Emily

“Jiyoung grew up being told to be cautious, to dress conservatively, to be “ladylike.” That it’s your job to avoid dangerous places, times of day and people. It’s your fault for not noticing and not avoiding.”
― Cho Nam-Joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

“Nina worried she liked being alone too much; it was the only time she ever fully relaxed. People were . . . exhausting. They made her anxious. Leaving her apartment every morning was the turning over of a giant hourglass, the mental energy she’d stored up overnight eroding grain by grain. She refueled during the day by grabbing moments of solitude and sometimes felt her life was a long-distance swim between islands of silence. She enjoyed people—she really did—she just needed to take them in homeopathic doses; a little of the poison was the cure.”
― Abbi Waxman, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill

“While offenders were in fear of losing a small part of their privilege, the victims were running the risk of losing everything.”
― Cho Nam-Joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

“In debating “how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich,” wrote the Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman, “they began by asking how the Americans did it.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents