Queena Li

“It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“We take this idea of love with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly and make everything better. It sounds ‘romantic’; yet it is a blueprint for disaster.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.”
― Bell Hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“But whatever I am, I know that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again--not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”
― Maggie Nelson