Catherine

“Personally, I thought the game worked in my favor, so I played it. I never had to force myself to love men, and they repaid the compliment. But now I’m nearly fifty. And my problem isn’t that they love me less than they used to. It’s that I find them less attractive. Men don’t age well. You constantly need someone to take care of you, reassure you, understand you, help you, nurse you. It’s too much work. Younger women are right, your masculinity is fragile.”
― Virginie Despentes, Dear Dickhead

“The more I have studied disparities in multicultural societies, the more I have found the language of “overrepresentation” and “underrepresentation” to be fundamentally misleading. These words assume that there is something normal or “to be expected” about seeing different ethnic groups represented at precisely their share of the total population in every domain, statistic, and occupation, when in fact nothing is more normal than for different subcultures to specialize in particular sectors and occupations and experience very different group-wide statistics as a result. The vast majority of such disparities are not plausibly explained by bigotry, systemic racism, or unfairness but by demographic and cultural differences between the groups in question at a particular time.”
― Coleman Hughes, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America

“Like all children, they knew more than they knew that they knew.”
― Andrea Barrett, Ship Fever: Stories

“A skilled interior designer can look at five shades of blue and distinguish azure, cobalt, ultramarine, royal blue, and cyan. My husband, on the other hand, would call them all blue. My students and I had discovered a similar phenomenon for emotions, which I described as emotional granularity.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain