Laura

“It seems that the message is ‘we have liberated our sexuality, therefore we must now celebrate it and have as much sex as we want,’” says Jo, an ace policy worker in Australia. “Except ‘as much sex as we want’ is always lots of sex and not no sex, because then we are oppressed, or possibly repressed, and we’re either not being our true authentic selves, or we haven’t discovered this crucial side of ourselves that is our sexuality in relation to other people, or we haven’t grown up properly or awakened yet.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“There is no such thing as a happy place. Because when you are happy, everywhere is a happy place. And when you are sad, everywhere is a sad place.”
― Alison Espach, The Wedding People

“The logical implication of these messages about the necessity of sex is that asexuality is an existential threat to any hope of a lasting relationship. Asexuality begins to feel like a twisted, reverse version of the scarlet A, a modern brand that now stands for ace and alone. It's no wonder that people hate the idea that they might be ace, if not wanting sex for any reason is a death sentence for romance.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex.

“It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom