Echo Louanna

“The moody politics of the moderns home had become complicated and confusing. There were many modern and apparently powerful women I knew who had made a home for everyone else, but did not feel at home in their family home.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“To be born at all is to be situated in a network for relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed. We're all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they're capable of and what they're allowed or forbidden to do. we're not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting. Freedom simply isnt a matter of indulging all material cravings, Sade-style. It's also about finding ways to live without being hampered, hobbled, damaged or actively destroyd by a constant reinforcement of ideas about what is permitted for the category of body to which youve been assigned.”
― Olivia Laing, Everybody: A Book About Freedom

“Satisfy your mind by responding to your senses.
We need to be actively conscious of them and not going about aimlessly in our daily lives. Note the differences between the following:
The passive state of seeing and the active state of looking.
The passive state of hearing and the active state of listening.
The passive state of noticing a smell and the active state of smelling something.
The passive state of tasting something and the active state of savouring it.
The passive state of touching something and the active state of feeling it.”
― Ryūnosuke Koike, The Practice of Not Thinking

“There is a difference between simply attending to a person's physical needs and caring for that person, with all that the word implies, and when you're on the receiving end, you can feel that difference. It's something to do with the presence or absence of emotional reciprocity and receptiveness. It's the difference between being met as a person and being dealt with like a thing.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism