Dawn

“I know that when you buy something, what you're paying for is the promise of a better life.”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento

“Vacations are like putting a Band-Aid on an axe wound. You go to places where you'll never be able to live, to experience a lifestyle you can't afford, and then you come back and see on the news they're talking about 'post-vacation syndrome' when really what they should say is 'Your life is so horrible that you get depressed when you have to return after two weeks of fantasy.”
― Beatriz Serrano, El descontento

“It is one thing to fail to provide for your children because you live under brutal material conditions, because you are impoverished or displaced, because your city is being firebombed; it is another to have every privilege, every resource, every organic berry and cut of grass-fed beef, and to see your child starve herself, to see her—this is how it felt—refuse life, the life you have offered. Is it because the life on offer is a lie? Is it because she knows that privilege involves the immiseration of others? is it because she registering a sense of futurelessness, catastrophe—fires, floods, fascism? Of course she couldn't tell us; she didn't have the language for it.”
― Ben Lerner, Transcription

“All that time I was giving to others instead of staying at home reading or drawing or simply looking at the ceiling, half naked, observing the cracks. I couldn’t stand the idea of being forced to live that office pantomime in perpetuity just to pay for things like rent or food or a book or a weekend at the beach. I broke down every morning when the alarm beeped because life, lived this way, seemed like a badly written tragedy, boring and sterile, devoid of fun and, even worse, devoid of content, and so, on my way to work, I felt like grabbing strangers by the shoulders and asking them why they weren’t feeling like me.”
― Beatriz Serrano, Discontent