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“I wish that future novelists would reject the pressure to write for the betterment of society. Art is not media. A novel is not an 'afternoon special' or fodder for the Twittersphere or material for the journalists to make neat generalizations about culture. A novel is not Buzzfeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood. Let's get clear about that. A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness. We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason. Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitative industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves?”
― Ottessa Moshfegh

“...[I]t doesn't take an advanced degree to figure out that this education talk is less a strategy for mitigating inequality than it is a way of rationalizing it. To attribute economic results to school years finished and SAT scores achieved is to remove matters from the realm of, well, economics and to relocate them to the provinces of personal striving and individual intelligence. From this perspective, wages aren't what they are because one party (management) has a certain amount of power over the other (workers); wages are like that because the god of the market, being surpassingly fair, rewards those who show talent and gumption. Good people are those who get a gold star from their teacher in elementary school, a fat acceptance letter from a good college, and a good life when they graduate. All because they are the best. Those who don't pay attention in high school get to spend their days picking up discarded cans by the side of the road. Both outcomes are our own doing.”
― Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

“While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

“casual acceptance of—even commitment to—human deprivation, to unemployment, inflation, and disastrously reduced living standards. This is even seen as essential therapy: out of the experience of unemployment and hunger will come a new and revitalized work ethic, a working force eager for the discipline of free enterprise.”
― Isabella M. Weber, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate