Mauri > Mauri's Quotes

“Our gods are conveniently like us, he would say, and why should they be? No answer I offered to this question ever satisfied him, until I gave in and said it must be because we invented them.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Children of Jocasta

“In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Although it’s good to try new things and to keep an open mind, it’s also extremely important to stay true to who you really are.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“I simply didn't know how to make things better. I could not solve the puzzle of me.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“A philosophical question: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? And if a woman who's wholly alone occasionally talks to a pot plant, is she certifiable? I think that it is perfectly normal to talk to oneself occasionally. It's not as though I'm expecting a reply. I'm fully aware that Polly is a houseplant.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock. The threads tighten slightly from Monday to Friday.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“When the silence and the aloneness press down and around me, crushing me, carving through me like ice, I need to speak aloud sometimes, if only for proof of life.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves wanting in deeply fundamental ways? When they opened a newspaper or watched a film, were they presented with nothing but exceptionally handsome young men, and did this make them feel intimidated, inferior, because they were not as young, not as handsome? Did they then read newspaper articles ridiculing those same handsome men if they gained weight or wore something unflattering?”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Your voice changes when you’re smiling, it alters the sound somehow.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“I have never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones I fight when my mind splinters and races, to swallow me into my own madness, again.”
― Nicole Lyons, Hush

“We all have seasons of needing and seasons of giving.”
― Alison Cochrun, Kiss Her Once for Me

“We all experience attraction differently, Some of us fall in and out of love easily. Some of us don’t experience
romantic love at all. Some of us have to fight to let ourselves be vulnerable enough to fall in
love. Some of us have to fight to let other people love us. Some of us need emotional intimacy in order to experience sexual attraction. All love and ways of
loving are love, Elle.”
― Alison Cochrun, Kiss Her Once for Me

“We are two queer women, and we're going to use this drive back to the cabin to do what queer women do."
Blood pressure: rising. "And, uh, what's that?"
"We're going to talk about our feelings"
Well. That's worse than I predicted.”
― Alison Cochrun, Kiss Her Once for Me

“Your trauma is something that happened to you; it’s not who you are.”
― Alison Cochrun, Kiss Her Once for Me

“I'm demi," I say. Then stupidly, I clarify "-sexual. Not demiromantic or a demigirl or a demigod like Hercules." [...]
"I didn't think you were coming out to me as the mythological hero Hercules."
"Sorry, I don't always know what other people know about the asexual spectrum.”
― Alison Cochrun, Kiss Her Once for Me

“But beneath the desire to be cherished was the ever-present thrum of my desire to be chosen. I wanted someone who would pick me to be their family.”
― Alison Cochrun, Kiss Her Once for Me

“I guess maybe that's how it works in families that love each other unconditionally. You can fight without fear of losing them, and be honest without consequences or repercussions.”
― Alison Cochrun, Kiss Her Once for Me

“Snow freezes time, so the constant pressure of life is briefly suspended in a blanket of snow, and for one day, it’s like you can catch your breath.”
― Alison Cochrun, Kiss Her Once for Me

“And it’s… real snow, like this… big snowstorms… they have the power to stop the world for a minute. Snow freezes time, so the constant pressure of life is briefly suspended in a blanket of snow, and for one day, it’s like you can catch your breath.”
― Alison Cochrun, Kiss Her Once for Me

“Everyone knows my sexuality is like a Rorschach test.” “What does that even mean?” “What you see when you look at me says a lot more about you than it does about me.”
― Alison Cochrun, Kiss Her Once for Me

“The ace world is not an obligation. Nobody needs to identify, nobody is trapped, nobody needs to stay forever and pledge allegiance. The words are gifts. If you know which terms to search, you know how to find others who might have something to teach.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Normal is often treated as a moral judgment, when it is often simply a statistical matter. The question of what everyone else is doing is less important than the question of what works for the two people in the actual relationship. It matters that everyone’s needs are carefully considered and respected, not that everyone is doing the same thing.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“It seems that the message is ‘we have liberated our sexuality, therefore we must now celebrate it and have as much sex as we want,’” says Jo, an ace policy worker in Australia. “Except ‘as much sex as we want’ is always lots of sex and not no sex, because then we are oppressed, or possibly repressed, and we’re either not being our true authentic selves, or we haven’t discovered this crucial side of ourselves that is our sexuality in relation to other people, or we haven’t grown up properly or awakened yet.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Compulsory sexuality is a set of assumptions and behaviors that support the idea that every normal person is sexual, that not wanting (socially approved) sex is unnatural and wrong, and that people who don’t care about sexuality are missing out on an utterly necessary experience.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“An undirected sex drive isn’t a quirk of ace experience; it’s another way of saying “being horny,” which can afflict anyone because horniness does not need to include sexual attraction. Imagine a gay man with a high sex drive surrounded by women. It is possible for him to feel horny and want to get laid even if he’s not interested in anyone around him.

Sexual attraction, then, is horniness toward or caused by a specific person. It is the desire to be sexual with that partner—libido with a target. To use a food metaphor: a person can feel physiological hunger, which would be like sex drive, without craving a specific dish, which would be more like sexual attraction.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Within relationships, the desire to have sex and the desire not to have sex are so often treated unequally because of the common belief that entering a relationship requires giving up a measure of consent.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“It is a failure of society if anyone needs to say “I have a partner” to turn someone down, and it is a failure of society if anyone needs to invoke a sexual orientation to avoid unwanted sex because saying no doesn’t do the job.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“In the desire to be respected, people become ableist and prejudiced, straining to present ourselves as happy and healthy when it should be fine to be ace and unhappy and unhealthy, like all the unhappy and unhealthy straight people out there.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“I like it when people give me attention! I like being interesting! And these are all things that our societal narrative attaches to sex,” Selena says. For allos, sex is so natural an explanation for behavior that other reasons, such as wanting to dress creatively for its own sake and wanting to be seen just to be seen, can be hard to fathom. “I’m like ‘I want you to stare at me, but I don’t want you to fuck me, and they have nothing to do with each other,’” Selena continues. “And then allos are so funny because they just insist that those have everything to do with each other.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex