Emily Joyce

“Alliance-based activism begins with the recognition that we are all individuals, each with a limited history and experiencing a largely unique set of privileges, expectations, assumptions, and restrictions. Thus, none of us have "superior knowledge" when it comes to sexuality and gender. By calling ourselves an alliance, we explicitly acknowledge that we are working toward a common goal [...], while simultaneously recognizing and respecting our many differences.”
― Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity

“I sometimes like to daydream that if we were all somehow simultaneously outed as lechers and perverts and sentimental slobs, it might be, after the initial shock of disillusionment, liberating. It might be a relief to quit maintaining the rigid pose of normalcy and own up to the outlaws and monsters we are.”
― Tim Kreider

“YEARS AGO I set three "rules" for myself. Every poem I write, I said, must have a genuine body, it must have sincere energy, and it must have a spiritual purpose. If a poem to my mind failed any one of these categories it was rebuked and redone, or discarded. Over the forty or so years during which writing poems has been my primary activity, I have added other admonitions and consents. I want every poem to "rest" in intensity. I want it to be rich with "pictures of the world." I want it to carry threads from the perceptually felt world to the intellectual world. I want each poem to indicate a life lived with intelligence, patience, passion, and whimsy (not my life—not necessarily!—but the life of my formal self, the writer). I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered. I want it to be clear that answering the question is the reader's part in an implicit author-reader pact. Last but not least, I want the poem to have a pulse, a breathiness, some moment of earthly delight. (While one is luring the reader into the enclosure of serious subjects, pleasure is by no means an unimportant ingredient.)”
― Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

“The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength,” he finally told them, “is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration