Olivia

“When I look back at my sexual history - those singular still shots and picture postcards - so little of it involves the actual physical act. Rather the before and after - the buildup to and takeaway from. It's me figuring out what I want and what I'm worth, a long line of cause and effect that started with spinning and ended in electricity.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays – Intellectually Fierce and Achingly Human Stories on Art, Courage, and Justice

“The conservative, who does not dispute the validity of revolutions deeply buried in history, invokes visions of impending anarchy in order to legitimize his demand for absolute obedience. Law and order, with the major emphasis on order, is his watchword. The liberal articulates his sensitiveness to certain of society's intolerable details, but will almost never prescribe methods of resistance which exceed the limits of legality - redress through electoral channels is the liberal's panacea.”
― Angela Y. Davis, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance

“I've always engaged with the heart as a metaphor: a desire, a thing to survive, to heal from or shoot for.

Now I know there's nothing more real.

We walk through the world at its leisure. We're here at its mercy and with its blessing.

At some point, we have to ask ourselves how we want to live.”
― Megan Stielstra, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays – Intellectually Fierce and Achingly Human Stories on Art, Courage, and Justice

“There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life's meaning. There can be sadness at not living out a more universal story - the suppose life cycle - how out of one life cycle another cycle is supposed to come. But when out of your life, no new cycle comes, what does that feel like? It feels like nothing. Yet there is a bit of a let-down feeling when the great things that happen in the lives of others - you don't actually want those things for yourself.”
― Sheila Heti, Motherhood