Madeline > Recent Status Updates

“I curled up, concentrating on excluding him: he was merely an object in the bed, like a sack or a large turnip.”

“There's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn't see why they would want to skin a cat even one way. I stared at the wall and thought of maxims: two can play that game, marry in haste, repent at leisure, least said soonest mended, traditional wisdom which was never any help.”

2/2 A lady was what you dressed up as on Halloween when you couldn't think of anything else and didn't want to be a ghost; or it was what u said at school when they asked u what u were going to be when u grew up, you said "A lady" or "A mother," either one was safe; and it wasn't a lie, I did want to be those things. On some of the pages were women's dresses clipped from mail-order catalogues, no bodies in them.”

1/2 “The next scrapbook was mine. I searched through it care-fully, looking for something I could recognize as myself, where I had come from or gone wrong; but there were no drawings at all, just illustrations cut from magazines and pasted in. They were ladies, all kinds: holding up cans of cleanser, knitting, smiling, modeling toeless high heels and nylons with dark seams and pillbox hats and veils.

“It is the purpose that makes it propaganda, and not the truthfulness or untruthfulness of it. If a broadcaster uses truth to affect the minds and emotions of a given group for a specific purpose, it is propaganda. Opinion analysis pertains to what people think; propaganda analysis deals with what somebody is trying to make them think.”

Linebarger

“As one volunteer at the London Lesbian line noted, ‘it was the idea that you could change someone’s life in 20 minutes. It allowed you to make direct contact with one woman and turn her life around just by saying to her, it’s perfectly alright to be a lesbian. You are completely normal. You can be happy. There will be a future for you.’”

“I wanted to get them off the island, to protect them from him, to protect him from them, save all of them from knowledge. They might start to explore, cut other trails; already they were beginning to be restless: fire and food, the only two necessities, were taken care of and there was nothing left to be done.”

“We keep our disappointment and displeasure quiet, revealing our disapproval of fatness only in our celebration of thinness. Ultimately, weight loss compliments don’t function without a hierarchy of bodies. Thinness is only worth celebrating if it is an accomplishment and thinness is only an accomplishment if fatness is a failure.”

It’s not so much the actual energy we care about, but the “end uses” for that energy. I.e. clean water, refrigeration, air conditioning/heat, internet, transportation, security, etc.

“Nearly every major social, political, scientific, and cultural revolution in the last few hundred years is at least partially a result of advances in our ability to harness energy.”

“Energy managed wisely- with long-term sustainability, affordability, and security in mind-gives us health and wealth; managed unwisely, it makes us sick and poor.”

You pray. In the next life, you hope you will be reincarnated as something softer-something that understands the innate sort of longing that makes a being whole. A graceful creature. Humming-bird. A dove.

It seems abundantly clear now, the opportunity you've wasted. There is good and there is evil, and the contradiction lives in everyone. The good is simply the stuff worth remembering. The good is the point of it all. The slippery thing you have always been chasing.

It arrives, at first, tingling small. Fleeting, a lump at the base of your throat. Something fragile and birdlike is trapped in your body, fluttering inconsolable.
Fear.
You swallow it in.

“When I have found a relative who is willing to have me, I shall take him or her into hand and alter his or her character and mode of living to suit my own taste. Then, when it pleases me, I shall marry.”

“I propose to send a letter to the relatives I have mentioned explaining the situation and asking them if they are willing to give me a home in exchange for my beautiful eyes and one hundred pounds a year.”

“You’re a participant in an experiment you didn’t volunteer for. New substances are being tested on all of us all of the time to see which of them are best at extracting money. Can a synthetic emulsifier be used instead of an egg? Can a seed oil replace dairy fat? Can a bit of ethyl methyl glycodate be chucked in instead of a strawberry?”

“This is a book about the systems that provide our food and tell us what to eat. I want to prompt you to imagine a world structured in a different way, a world that would offer everyone more opportunity and choice.”

Commerciogenic disease: a disease caused by the marketing and consumption of addictive substances.

“Diet related diseases come from the collision of some ancient genes with a new food ecosystem that is engineered to drive excess consumption and that we currently seem unable, or perhaps unwilling, to improve.”

“Our diet is the #1 cause of premature death and the #1 cause of disability.”

“There’s a reason you hear about the latest drugs on television - huge corporate budgets drive their promotion. The same reason you’ll probably never see a commercial for sweet potatoes is the same reason breakthroughs on the power of foods to affect your health and longevity May never make it to the public: there’s little profit motive.”

“Only a quarter of medical schools appear to offer a single dedicated course on nutrition.”

“The U.S. healthcare system runs on a fee for service model in which doctors get paid for the pills and procedures they prescribe, rewarding quantity over quality. We don’t get reimbursed for time spent counseling our patients about the benefits of healthy eating. If doctors were instead paid for performance, there would be a financial incentive to treat the lifestyle causes of disease.”

“Heterosexual scripts were so clear and loud. There was a beautiful simplicity to them, a relief in yielding to their small violences, in joining the collective movement toward that impossible goal: to be wanted. As if that were an end point, a place where we might arrive and set up camp.”

“As long as she thinks of a man, no one objects to a woman thinking.” - Virginia Woolf

“It was frightening to confront the fact of one’s own propensity for self betrayal. It had been narrow escape. The part of me who wanted to leave had only the thinnest advantage over that older instinct that compelled me to stay.”

“The chaplain watched you with a stark sort of pity—you have always believed that pity is the most offensive of feelings. Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy.
Pity strips you bare. Pity shrinks.”

“To quit something is to leave it, to remove oneself from the sight of it. We quit jobs, gambling, biting our nails, and sometimes people. To give something up is to relinquish it; to hand it over to some other, better keeper. To free one’s hands for other holdings. It is more surrender than departure.”

Ummmmmm okay this is so good so far. I’m suspecting a future favorite