Elizabeth

“For me, gender is a lot like language. Language, too, is a social construct, but one that expresses very real things. The word “happiness" was created by humans, but that doesn't diminish the fact that happiness is a very real feeling. People can have a deeply held sense of their own gender, even if the descriptions, characteristics, attributes, and expressions of that gender are made up by society. And just as with happiness, for which there are varying words, expressions, and actions that demonstrate that same feeling, gender can have an infinite number of expressions.”
― Sarah McBride

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Negroes were constantly being arrested in the city, for crimes they committed and for crimes they did not, for rudeness or talking back or looking at a white woman, for being in the wrong neighborhood or being suspected of being in the vicinity of the wrong neighborhood. Upon conviction, many of these men were, in the words of one historian, "literally sold to the highest bidders." Convicts were much in demand as workers, and the state, not the convict, got the wage.”
― Stephen L. Carter, Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster

“Having too many THINGS," he says, "[Americans] spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul. A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and Nature throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.”
― John Steinbeck