Saira Khan > Saira's Quotes

“I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“And suicide is the third, ultimate use of suffering—conceived of not as an end to suffering, but as the ultimate way of acting on suffering.”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“Who can say to love doesn’t also mean to disappoint and to deceive? I said.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Finally she said something that I would never have had the courage to utter: “Look, Marcello tried in every possible way to buy me but no one is going to buy me.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“and compare it with mine and feel—I hoped—in the lead. Luckily I sensed that she would never do it and that I would only have stupidly exposed myself. I remained silent, as she did.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“But I must have overdone it, and the relationship between truth and fiction must have gone awry: now every street, every building had become recognizable,”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.”
― George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“Indeed, what is remarkable about the sexual revolution—this is why it was so formative for the politics of a generation of radical feminists—is how much was left unchanged. Women who say no still really mean yes, and women who say yes are still sluts. Black and brown men are still rapists, and the rape of black and brown women still doesn’t count. Girls are still asking for it. Boys still must learn to give it.”
― Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century