Ila

“Hope is the pimp of death, a murderer more dangerous than hatred.”
― Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish

“Trainwrecks, as public figures, are necessarily also myths. But they’re the villains of the story; they’re our monsters and demons, images of what we fear, and who we fear becoming. I hated Britney early on, because I hated being forced into the role she seemingly enjoyed playing; I wanted to reject the feminine ideal she supposedly embodied, and I wound up rejecting her.

But every wreck is a potential role that women need or want to reject; the magnitude of our hatred for them is determined by how powerfully we fear what they represent. In Britney’s case, she represented the end of youth, and the corruption of purity: She was the pretty, good little girl who became ugly and bad when she grew up, the “Queen of Teen” who was used- up and over-the-hill by age twenty-five. She was the Wages of Feminism, the working mother who tried to have it all and wound up nearly dropping her baby onto the sidewalk. She was the cost of public life, for women.”
― Sady Doyle, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why

“In all the churches of the city people said heartfelt prayers for his recovery, urging the Almighty to make allowances for one atheist, and God was already supposed to know why he should act on their request. In creating man, God had also created competition for himself. If he didn’t listen to the prayers for Tito’s recovery, he would soon see for himself what kind of monsters his most perfect creations could turn into.”
― Miljenko Jergović, Dvori od oraha

“There were no doubt gentlemen of different degrees, but the English gentleman of gentlemen was he who had land, and family title-deeds, and an old family place, and family portraits, and family embarrassments, and a family absence of any useful employment.”
― Anthony Trollope