Katie

“What did those people teach you?" he asked me one night, mystified. "What exactly do Catholics believe?"

I'd been preparing my whole life for this question. "First of all, blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead. Do it right now. Fourth of all, Martin Luther was a pig in a cloak. Fifth of all, Jesus is alive, but he's also dead, and he's also immortal, but he's also made of clouds, and his face is a picture of infinite peace, but he also always looks like one of those men in a headache commercial, because you'rec causing him so much suffering whenever you cuss. He is so gentle that sheep seem like demented murderers in his presence, but also rays of sunlight shoot out of his face so hard they can kill people. In fact, they do kill people, and one day they will kill you. He has a tattoo of a daisy on his lower back and he gets his hair permed every eight weeks. He's wearing a flowing white dress, but only because people didn't know about jeans back then. He's holding up two fingers because his dad won't let him have a gun. If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic."

Jason was aghast. "Thorns?" he whispered. "But that's the most dangerous part of the rose.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy

“Here’s the headline: In the first year alone, women saved $ 1.4 billion on birth control pills. Today we’re at a thirty-year low for unintended pregnancy, a historic low in teen pregnancy, and the lowest abortion rate since Roe v. Wade. These facts are too often overlooked, even though this is one of the biggest public health success stories of the last century. It didn’t happen on its own—it happened in large part due to better and more affordable access to birth control.”
― Cecile Richards, Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead

“But lately I've been wondering how everything got so *intimately* terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along. How did a huge number of people begin spending the bulk of our disappearing free time in an openly torturous environment? How did the internet get so bad, so confining, so inescapably personal, so politically determinative - and why are all those questions asking the same thing?”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“A woman's body always stands on the outskirts of the town, verging on uncivilization. A think paper gown is all that separates it from the wilderness. Half of its whole being is devoted to remembering how to live in the woods. This is why Witch, this is why whore, this is why Unlucky, and this is why Unclean. This is why attempts to govern the female body always have the feeling of a last resort, because the female body is fundamentally ungovernable. Barbie, the neatest, tannest, blondest tall who ever existed. Barbie, from the Greek, meaning foreign or strange.”
― Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy