Vic S-F

“Ableism," her husband said, encountering the concept for the very first time. "Moby Dick...was ableist...to Captain Ahab?"

"No," she said, her head in her hands. "No. No. No. No." His grasp of such subjects had always been limited. He believed, for instance, that sexism was when someone was "mean to Mary Tyler Moore.”
― Patricia Lockwood

“But that alteration, catastrophic though it was, had long been absorbed into the water table; the unspeakable day still flooded the downs. He wasn't the type to convince himself that facts were not facts, but he needed to stop living intolerable spans again. Surely it was enough to have lived them once.”
― H.S. Cross

“Remind the people that there's nothing wrong with having a set limit to how much time you want to dedicate as a community to wrangling over the specificities of language. Obviously you're all going to do some wrangling. I'm not saying no wrangling, I'm just saying maybe sometimes it will help to ask yourselves: does this directly address material reality that isn't currently being served by preexisting language? And if the answer is "Not really," maybe you can all agree to move on.”
― Daniel Mallory Ortberg, as the apostle Paul

“Part of the problem is that mental illnesses are not primarily bad feelings, but the thought patterns and compulsions the sufferer develops to deal with them. These are difficult to let go of because, in a limited way, they work. Systems of magical thinking do provide reassurance, even if it takes torturous negotiations with one’s own brain to get there. I sort of agree with Freud that our mental dysfunctions are related to childhood shame, but rather than repressing shameful parts of ourselves, these dysfunctions help us protect them.”
― Alice Bolin, Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving American Culture