Marissa S Olson > Recent Status Updates

“Freedom isn’t a blank slate, she wants to tell them. Freedom is teeming and complicated and, yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others” (321)

“She wants to be free’ and what is freedom if not the wresting of the self from the gaze of others, including her own? Life is meant to be lived, to be seized for all the beauty and joy to be wrung out of it; it isn’t meant to be contained or inventoried for the sake of safety” (306)

“It is a chilly morning, but made cheerful somehow by the sound of the rain, the first of the season, which falls either great abandon on the world outside. The patter is invigorating, as if she herself were a tender plant, its leaves scorched, now opening itself up to receive sustenance” (244)

“Entire generations have never known life without surveillance. Watched from the womb to the grave, they take corporate ownership of their personal data to be a fact of life, as natural as leaves growing on trees.” 280

“That no matter how unjust the system is, she is expected to submit to it in order to prove that she deserves to be free of its control” (111)

“To be a woman was to watch yourself not just through your own eyes, but through the eyes of others.”