Lauren Pusateri-Nilson > Lauren's Quotes

“Why must we treat what are obviously systemic problems as failures of individual morality?”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“Many patients have described the experience of receiving their drugs as humiliating—they may be handed their medicine while being told that this only happened because they were unclean or poor or otherwise lesser.[*] This is often not an environment patients are excited to return to—and yet somehow we always seem to blame the patient for noncompliance, rather than blaming the structures of the social order that make compliance more difficult.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“There is a benefit to systematizing healthcare, to treating everyone like they are everyone else. But there is also a cost.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“Shreya’s sister had given her the novel after Shreya became too breathless to leave her bed, the result not only of an infectious TB pathogen but of a society’s unwillingness to help her survive.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“I care about TB because of Henry.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“And so we have entered a strange era of human history: A preventable, curable infectious disease remains our deadliest. That’s the world we are currently choosing. But we can choose a different world. In fact, we will choose a different world.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.”
― Percival Everett, James

“The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don’t know.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Think of all the new people you’re going to meet,” she said. “That’s the whole point of life, you know? To meet new people. I wish I could go with you. It’s such an exciting idea.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“To arm us all with the knowledge we need to reclaim a language that for so long has been used against us.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Linguists have actually determined that the majority of insults for men sprout from references to femininity, either from allusions to women themselves or to stereotypically feminine men: wimp, candy-ass, motherfucker. (Even the word woman itself is often used as a term of ridicule. I can hear it now: “Dude, don’t be such a woman.”)”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“talking about insults; this can also be applied to one’s legal name (which 70 percent of American women still believe they should change with marriage, either unaware or in denial of the fact that this signifies a transfer of ownership from their dads to their husbands). When we compare a woman to a farm animal or a fruity pastry, it isn’t random; it reflects what our language’s speakers believe (or want to believe) to be true.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Thus, women’s experiences wind up getting squashed under their own generosity as listeners.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Analyze a few hundred transcripts of dude-on-dude chatter and you’ll usually find a dominant speaker who holds the floor, and a subordinate waiting for his turn. It’s a vertical structure. But with women, the conversation is frequently much more horizontal and malleable; everyone is an equal player. While men tend to view conversation as an arena for establishing hierarchies and expressing individual achievement, women’s goals are typically to support the other speakers and emphasize solidarity.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Language is not always about making an argument or conveying information in the cleanest, simplest way possible. It’s often about building relationships. It’s about making yourself understood and trying to understand someone else.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“(“It is undeniable,” says Coates, “that one of the burdens of being born female is the imperative to be nice.”*)”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Ultimately, language can serve as a rather blatant means of otherizing all things feminine.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Her eyes were wide. “I’d follow a clown into a storm drain if he had a baby goat in pajamas.”
― Abby Jimenez, Part of Your World

“Eight thousand nerves in the clitoris and still not as sensitive as a white man not getting his way.”
― Abby Jimenez, Part of Your World

“This movement to delegitimize midwifery rose alongside Jim Crow laws, Hossain argues in The Pain Gap, with doctors and health officials linking midwifery to high rates of infant and maternal mortality as well as “illiteracy, carelessness and general filth.”13 A reliable, safe, supportive system of care was dismantled by politics, racism, and capitalism.”
― Rebecca Little, I'm Sorry for My Loss: An Urgent Examination of Reproductive Care in America

“So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“These people needed to hate something smaller than themselves as much as they needed to have faith in something greater than themselves.”
― Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them

“But a workplace predicated on the assumption that a worker can come into work every day, at times and locations that are wholly unrelated to the location or opening hours of schools, childcare centres, doctors and grocery stores, simply doesn’t work for women. It hasn’t been designed to.”
― Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“But the gig economy is in fact often no more than a way for employers to get around basic employee rights.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“Women have always worked. They have worked unpaid, underpaid, underappreciated, and invisibly, but they have always worked. But the modern workplace does not work for women. From its location, to its hours, to its regulatory standards, it has been designed around the lives of men and it is no longer fit for purpose.”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“According to the FDA, the second most common adverse drug reaction in women is that the drug simply doesn’t work, even though it clearly works in men. So with that substantial sex difference in mind: how many drugs that would work for women are we ruling out at phase one trials just because they don’t work in men?”
― Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

“It’s not my fault if I’ve spent a sizable chunk of my formative years in Italy, where time is but a polite suggestion.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love on the Brain