Spinebender Reviews

“We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenaged girls got pregnant in the state of Vermont last year, rather than how many men and teenaged boys got girls pregnant. So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political effect. It shifts the focus off men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term violence against women is problematic. It's a passive construction. There's no active agent in the sentence. It's a bad thing that happens to women. It's a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term violence against women, nobody is doing it to them. It just happens. Men aren't even a part of it! Jackson Katz, Ph.D., from his Ted talk "violence against women: it's a men's issue”
― Jackson Katz, Ph. D.

“Real things are made things. Are you a real person, or did your parents make you up? Is that a real mountain or did the forces of the universe make it up? Is the virtual reality of the Internet real or did imaginative people like Steve Jobs make it up?”
― Mary Ruefle, On Imagination

“I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, 'I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say'; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.”
― Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

“I wanna go away until I'm gone. It takes so much less energy to not exist than it does to exist and get burned.”
― Neil Hilborn, Our Numbered Days