231 books
—
312 voters
Sharon
https://www.goodreads.com/charon
Why was she quiet? There were several reasons. She liked to observe her surroundings, to soak them in, rather than to insert herself clumsily into them. Somehow the words in her head rarely exited her mouth as elegantly as she had hoped.
...more
“Normal is often treated as a moral judgment, when it is often simply a statistical matter. The question of what everyone else is doing is less important than the question of what works for the two people in the actual relationship. It matters that everyone’s needs are carefully considered and respected, not that everyone is doing the same thing.”
― Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
― Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
“My pain was never more valuable than his potential.”
― Know My Name
― Know My Name
“As Julie Sondra Decker, author of The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality, tells me, “We’re whole people who just lack that ‘driving force’ and it’s understandable in the same way that it’s understandable that someone doesn’t have ‘crafts’ as their driving force.” (Or in the way that people don’t have “not wearing sock-monkey hats” as their driving force.) “I’m not a ‘non-crafter’; I’m only asexual because there’s a word for it and because people have an objection to me not wanting to have sex. If they didn’t, my life would not have involved very much of talking about it,” she says.”
― Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
― Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
“There is a wonderful word for this sensory bubble—Umwelt. It was defined and popularized by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909. Umwelt comes from the German word for “environment,” but Uexküll didn’t use it simply to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world. Like the occupants of our imaginary room, a multitude of creatures could be standing in the same physical space and have completely different Umwelten. A tick, questing for mammalian blood, cares about body heat, the touch of hair, and the odor of butyric acid that emanates from skin. These three things constitute its Umwelt. Trees of green, red roses too, skies of blue, and clouds of white—these are not part of its wonderful world. The tick doesn’t willfully ignore them. It simply cannot sense them and doesn’t know they exist.”
― An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
― An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
“Difference can be a gift. Being ace can mean less interpersonal drama and more freedom from social norms around relationships. It is an opportunity to focus more on other passions, to be less distracted by sexuality, to break the scripts, to choose your own adventure and your own values.”
― Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
― Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge
— 26808 members
— last activity 3 hours, 22 min ago
An annual reading challenge to to help you stretch your reading limits and explore new voices, worlds, and genres! The challenge begins in January, bu ...more
Sharon’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Sharon’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Sharon
Lists liked by Sharon

































































