Megan

“Trying to preserve some "space for yourself" in the crowded domestic sphere feels like obsessively cupping your hands around thin air. You carve it out, the time you need, after much anxiety and debate, and get into the separate space and look between your hands and there it is — nothing. An empty victory.”
― Zadie Smith, Intimations

“Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death.”
― André Gide

“It is easy to despise institutions, to feel irritated or constrained by them - as I often do, despite a fondness for an ordered existence - but confronted with the style of Cy I felt glad he was at least tethered to an institution, like a red balloon caught in a tree, instead of floating out into the unforgiving city and finding himself deflated in the IT department of a bank or ad agency or some such. [...] The best we could hope for was that the university might act as a superstructure, accommodating and supporting our curious shapes and styles, and that this institutional cover would fool people into thinking we were something like utilities - and therefore something worth retaining - rather than peculiar manifestations of the spirit, seemingly put on earth to connect one thing to another.”
― Zadie Smith, Intimations

“If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace