Wren

“She gathered the little cards together with an automatic hand. That was the phrase that came to her, as if her hand were purely mechanical, not alive at all, as if the messages from her skin and her nerves were changes in the anbaric current along a copper wire, not anything conscious. With that vision of her body as something dead and mechanical came a sense of listless desolation. She felt not only as if she were dead now, but that she’d always been dead, and had only dreamed of being alive, and that there was no life in the dream either: it was only the meaningless and indifferent jostling of particles in her brain, and nothing more.
But that little chain of ideas provoked a spasm of reaction, and she thought, No! That’s a lie! That’s slander! I don’t believe it!
Except that she did believe it, just then, and it was killing her.”
― Philip Pullman, The Secret Commonwealth

“Well-meaning guides usually point out that sexual norms are too rigid and that everyone would be happier if we stopped worrying about having sex exactly like everyone else. However, almost no books go on to say that it’s okay if someone doesn’t want to have sex at all. Constrictions need to be loosened, but not too much. The underlying assumption is that sex in relationships is imperative and everything else—the amount of sex, the number of partners, the positions, the toys—follows from that axiom.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“The ace world is not an obligation. Nobody needs to identify, nobody is trapped, nobody needs to stay forever and pledge allegiance. The words are gifts. If you know which terms to search, you know how to find others who might have something to teach.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“This book is for hot autistic people, people from the city, people who have been mistaken for a different ethnicity, queer and trans people who are tired of being strong and just want to do jokes, tall girls, and haters.”
― Rebecca K. Reilly, Greta & Valdin