Salem

“Am I sitting here now, months later, in Los Angeles, writing all this down, because I want my life to matter? Maybe so. But I don't want it to matter more than others.

I want to remember, or to learn, how to live as if it matters, as if they all matter, even if they don't.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts

“you trying to take my life away from me?). I’d have to do my best to calmly reason away: “You can keep your life! You’re not like me. Someone would have told you if you were like me! You’d definitely know by now if you were like me. Even though I didn’t know I was like me until quite recently, and it came as quite a surprise. Oh, no—maybe you are like me. Maybe you would never have known that you were like me as long as I’d never told you, but now that I’ve told you you’ve started thinking about it, and once you start thinking about it you can’t stop, and now you are going to have to transition—my God, it is contagious! Get everyone else out of this coffee shop, for the love of Christ, if you want to maintain persistent gender continuity—it’s onsetting rapidly, this gender dysphoria, and I don’t know who it’s going to claim next!”
― Daniel Mallory Ortberg, Something That May Shock and Discredit You

“That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“Feminism is really just the long slow realization that the things you love hate you.”
― Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman