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“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human difference between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.”
― Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
― Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
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“For within livin structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.”
― Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
― Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
“Yet when the masses turn (as turn they will one day) and try to end the tyranny of centuries, not only the tyrants but all ‘civilisation’ holds up its hands in horror and clamours for ‘order’ to be restored. If a revolution carries high overhead expenses, most of them it inherits from the greed of reactionaries and the cowardice of the so-called moderates. Long before abolition the mischief had been done in the French colonies and it was not abolition but the refusal to abolish which had done it.”
― The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
― The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
“The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.”
― Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.”
― Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
Susan’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Susan’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
352 books
|
60 friends
30 books
|
15 friends
1,997 books
|
625 friends
924 books
|
107 friends
6,128 books
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1,167 friends
357 books
|
14 friends
637 books
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1,199 friends
701 books
|
199 friends
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