Ailey | Bisexual Bookshelf > Ailey | Bisexual Bookshelf's Quotes

“Throughout history, laws regulating intimate relationships, especially marriage laws, have been about nation-building...”
― Sophie K. Rosa, Radical Intimacy

“This prioritisation of the couple form might involve a shrinking not only of the self, but also of more expansive intimacies - and therefore solidarities.”
― Sophie K. Rosa, Radical Intimacy

“The family…is construed as the inevitable, happy and moral culmination of human endeavour.”
― Sophie K. Rosa, Radical Intimacy

“Developers like Ballymore don’t tend to sell well-built homes at fair prices; instead, they flog an idea of home.”
― Sophie K. Rosa, Radical Intimacy

“Grieving is antithetical to productivity.”
― Sophie K. Rosa, Radical Intimacy

“Being alive together might mean, for instance. a collective responsibility to build a world in which being alive is better… grief can bring our awareness to what matters most, and in doing so be a source of radical intimacy and transformation.”
― Sophie K. Rosa, Radical Intimacy

“The idea that being in a couple should fulfill all our intimate needs leads to desolation for many.”
― Sophie K. Rosa, Radical Intimacy

“Many invisible or less visible disabilities go unnoticed by people in their daily interactions because most people presume abledness in others.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“The issue of breeding itself raises all sorts of complex questions about normalcy, naturalness, and the boundaries between disability and enhancement.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Countless investigative reports and studies have shown just how cruel, toxic, and terrible these industries are, not just for animals, but for the environment, workers, and human health overall.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Ableist values are central to animal industries, where the dependency, vulnerability, and presumed lack of emotional awareness or intellectual capacity of animals creates the groundwork for a system that makes billions of dollars in profit off of animal lives.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“I am confronted with a barrage of technologies, advertisements, and movie plotlines that suggest sitting in a wheelchair or not being able to walk means an end to a full life.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Crip time asks us to think about time as variable and changing with our embodiments.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“I am unwilling to return to the framework of human exceptionalism that says all human life has value while the lives of nonhuman animals do not. Does this mean instead that the lives of all sentient beings are equal? Are we to say that the killing of a human and a chicken are equally wrong? I would rather leave these uncomfortable questions unanswered than embrace theories of personhood that demean the value of intellectually disabled people and nonhuman animals. It is better to acknowledge such uncomfortable spaces...than to limit our moral understanding simply in order to satisfy some need for hierarchies of values. If our theories lead us to such conclusions, then they are not good enough or complete enough.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Histories of racism, colonialism and patriarchy have conveniently been erased from this idealized fantasy of preindustrial agriculture, while ableism and speciesism have simply gone unquestioned.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“All of us exist along a spectrum of dependency. The challenge is to understand dependency not simply as negative, and certainly not as unnatural, but rather as an integral part of our world and our relationships.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“An Indian dying is like a balsam fir getting chopped down. Trees for mile and miles feel the pain under the soil. They send their reserve nutrients through the root network to the stump, which closes over with bark like a scab. Eventually, the stump turns into a nursery, a home for new growth, for something else to take shape. This isn't the same as healing or being reborn, but it's the closest we'll ever get.”
― Jessica Johns, Bad Cree

“But I guess the bad isn't a thing you can run from, because it's not a thing that can be held. It doesn't announce itself, there's no siren or beacon. Instead, it's a steady beating, like a heart or a drum. It's a sound that lives in the body and grows down into the ground.”
― Jessica Johns, Bad Cree

“It's the bad that has been passed down and passed down and passed down, that weaves itself in the marrow of our bones. A bad inflicted on us, one we have no business carrying. And we're all just coping with it in the ways we know how.”
― Jessica Johns, Bad Cree

“I worry that this place, the solitude of my life in this apartment, in this city, has turned my memories monstrous. That loneliness can make once-beautiful things terrifying.”
― Jessica Johns, Bad Cree

“She scoffs into the phone. "Our ancestors and spirits hae been speaking to us in a million different ways for thousands of years. You think they would have a hard time figuring out texting?"

I'm silent at the simplicity of the statement. How easy belief in my truth comes to her.”
― Jessica Johns, Bad Cree

“How far away from her was I that she could look so small when all my life she had been a mountain?”
― Jessica Johns, Bad Cree

“I want this embrace to mean everything between us is forgiven, that the years of heartbreak can be healed. But for all a body can do, it can't dam a river that runs too wide.”
― Jessica Johns, Bad Cree

“I wonder what’s worse, living in the deep marrow of grief or pretending the person you’re grieving never existed in the first place.”
― Jessica Johns, Bad Cree

“I think about all these secrets we've all been holding tight to our chests like a bad hand of cards, trying to bluff our way out of losing it all. How did all of these dreams lie between us?”
― Jessica Johns, Bad Cree

“Sorting subjects into any classification can force patterns to show up, and when these patterns are reinforced by political realities, they become institutionalized.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“Astrological ideas about where planets are allowed to be at home are also sociopolitical ideas about who is allowed to be at home.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“If the Sun stands for the future, then it also stands for s specific type of future that is carefully engineered, omnipotently surveilled, and designed to break society away from its own histories and traditions.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“In liberal societies where identities are performative and surveilled, you’re never sure that what you see is what you get. Within liberal societies, authenticity becomes elevated to morality.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“In a landscape that sees the spectacle of financial theater as more real than production or natural resources - a landscape afraid that drops in the value of gold stock would be more detrimental to the nation than the real exploitation of Black laborers in the mining industries - capital is more real than life.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor