Jessica Cramer

“And that was comforting, too. That each person could choose what brought them closest to belonging, the power in that. Knowing that one day, people might discover even better words for it. That there was only ever freedom in continuing to find new names for who we were, who we could be.”
― Anita Kelly, Love & Other Disasters

“We hear a lot about disruptive start-ups like Uber, or Airbnb, challenging the existing order. We're told this is creative and necessary. Maybe it is.

My feeling is that we could do with more stability in our outward-facing lives so that we could risk disruption to our inner lives; our thinking, feeling, imaginative lives.

When we're just like the animals, concentrating on food, territory, survival, mating, being the leader of the pack, then what is the point of being human?

The sad truth is that no political system (and capitalism is a political system) has succeeded in providing most of us with the basics we need, so that we have some freedom to explore what might be happening in the 98 per cent of our brains that we don't use.

That looks like failure to me.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days

“We had noticed everything once - the water collecting on the berried ivy, the mistletoe in the dark-armed oak, the barn where the owl sat under the tiles, the smoke like a message curling up from forest-burnt fires, the ancientness of time and us part of it.

Why had we learned to hurry through every day when every day was all we had?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days

“With masks on, we all looked the same—potential carriers and sources of infection. We were a virus called humans, the same virus that has plagued the Earth for tens of thousands of years.”
― Kim Ho-yeon, The Second Chance Convenience Store