Ashleigh

“Rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace, of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy. Rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures" (The Queer Art of Failure, "Ending, Fleeing, Surviving").”
― J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

“I wanna look like what I am but don't know what someone like me looks like. I mean, when people look at me I want them to think-- there's one of those people that reasons, that is a philosopher, that has their own interpretation of happiness. That's what I am.”
― Louis Graydon Sullivan, We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan

“I have often wondered why the farthest-out position always feels so right to me; why extremes, although difficult and sometimes painful to maintain, are always more comfortable than one plan running straight down a line in the unruffled middle.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness