Jacque Ni

“One often hears that the liberation of women cannot take place without the liberation of men. The cliché is true, up to a point. Women and men share the same ultimate aim: to gain genuine autonomy, which means participating in (and being let alone by) a society that is not based on alienation and repression. But the cliché is also dangerous, for it implicitly denies that there are stages in the struggle to liberate women. Like many clichés which are true, it disarms thoughts and pacifies rage. It encourages a passive and merely reformist view of the problem.”
― Susan Sontag, On Women

“To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life? As I wheeled my electric bike through the park on the way to my writing shed, my hands had turned blue from the cold. I had given up wearing gloves because I was always grappling in the dark for keys. I stopped by the fountain, only to find it had been switched off. A sign from the council read, This fountain has been winterized. I reckoned that is what had happened to me too.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“The cliché that when women are liberated men will be liberated too shamelessly slides over the raw reality of male domination — as if this were an arrangement in fact arranged by nobody, which suits nobody, which works to nobody’s advantage. In fact, the very opposite is true. The domination of men over women is to the advantage of men; the liberation of women will be at the expense of male privilege. Perhaps afterwards, in some happy sense, men will be liberated too — liberated from the tiresome obligation to be ‘masculine.’ But allowing oppressors to lay down their psychological burdens is quite another, secondary sense of liberation. The first priority is to liberate the oppressed. Never before in history have the claims of oppressed and oppressors turned out to be, on inspection, quite harmonious. It will not be true this time either.”
― Susan Sontag

“My point is that there is nothing tragic in me knowing that the best days of my life are behind me.”
― Graham Norton, Frankie