Elsie How

“If caring work is familial love, based in the all-sacrificing love of the mother, creative work is romantic love, based in a different kind of self-sacrifice and voluntary commitment that is expected, on some level, to love you back. Yet work never, ever loves you back.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“The history of the word treaty begins with a violence, which then moves through something that deals with it—often writing. After which comes something like: healing. A remedy. All writing, then, and all art, is a kind of treaty—between the reader and the writing, between the art and the world, between the fire of the past that burnished us and the fire of the present that consumes us and the fire of the future we might forge. Honor the treaty. THE LIMITS OF WHITE FANTASY”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“However, sometimes I feel that those who fight to protect it do so less like warriors and more like helicopter parents so worried about comedy getting hurt and comedy moving beyond them that they stunt its development. To openly allow for critique is to take comedy seriously, and taking it seriously will allow it to evolve and mature.”
― Jesse David Fox, Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work