Kerry > Kerry's Quotes

“But you want murderous feelings? Hang around librarians," confided Gamache. "All that silence. Gives them ideas.”
― Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder

“Honesty was often just a way of being cruel.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance

“It is all too easy to give ourselves over to the traumas of the past -- allowing pain to define us. There is a medicine for that -- hope and perseverance. Light brings light. And no matter what we face there is one thing we can control: our outlook. It's not about ignoring the pain, or mindlessly believing things will simply be better -- it's about finding the joy in participating. And when the weight of the past pulls us low we must find the strength to release it ... and finally give ourselves permission to start over.”
― Rick Remender, Low, Vol. 2: Before the Dawn Burns Us

“Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“It was how she made him laugh as a thirteen-year-old. It's why he dreaded the moment when they'd have to get off the bus at Rainrock Road and part ways—because he knew there was a finite number of those bus rides in this one precious life.”
― Stephen Markley, Ohio

“Life itself has become the final disposable, exploitable resource. We will do anything. Level whole mountains, erase whole species, relocate mighty rivers, burn forests to the ground, change the pH of the water, blanket ourselves in toxic chemistry. It took two million years for our species just to stand up and only five hundred to do the rest. Our culture is one of abundance, of entitlement, and basically little else. We've put our birthright at risk because we don't know how to control ourselves. Our lust.”
― Stephen Markley, Ohio

“For women in 1956 were always confronting boundaries, negotiations: where they could walk at night, how far they could let a man go when the two of them were alone. Men hardly seemed troubled by these things; they walked everywhere in cold, dark cities and pin-drop empty streets, and they let their hands go walking, too, and they opened their belts and then their trousers, and they never thought to themselves: I must stop this right now. I must not go any further.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Wife

“Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. “Listen,” we say. “Everything will be okay.” And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Wife

“I'd looked and looked at him for so long; I'd made a habit of it, a vocation, and I could stop looking now.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Wife

“It’s not that I hate men,” the woman says. “I’m just terrified of them. And I’m okay with that fear.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

“You're framing an inevitability as a choice. And what valor is there in failing to drown when you're strapped to a raft?”
― Gabrielle Squailia, Viscera

“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“The pressure to be “good” is not exclusive to one gender, nor is it applied equally to all genders. To be clear, the stress on girls to be “good” far surpasses any stress men might feel to be “good.” This disparity is perhaps best exemplified by the fact that when a girl does something “wrong,” few mourn her goodness. We rarely hear, “I thought she was one of the good girls.” Women who behave “badly” are ultimately not given the same benefit of the doubt as men and are immediately cast off as bitches or sluts. Men might be written off as “dogs,” but their reckless behaviour is more often unnoticed, forgiven, or even celebrated—hence our cultural fixation with bad boys.”
― Vivek Shraya , I'm Afraid of Men.

“This praise highlights another problem with the idea of the "good man"—the bar is ultimately a low one, and men are heralded every day for engaging in basic acts of domestic labour like washing dishes. It is this low bar that also renders the experiences I've shared unexceptional and therefore so often unnoticed. Sexist comments, intimidation, groping, violating boundaries, and aggression are seen as merely "typical" for men. But "typical" is dangerously interchangeable with "acceptable." "Boys will be boys," after all.”
― Vivek Shraya, I'm Afraid of Men.

“If we want masculinity to be different, we must confront and tackle the baseline instead of longing for exceptions. Loving your mother, holding a door open for a woman, being a good listener, or even being a feminist doesn't make a man an exception. Experiencing oppression—including racism, homophobia, and transphobia—doesn't make a man an exception. If we are invested in perpetuating and glorifying the myth of the "good man," we are also complicit in overlooking, if not permitting, the reprehensible behaviour of the "typical man.”
― Vivek Shraya, I'm Afraid of Men.

“This promise - that you will get more because they exist to get less - is woven throughout our entire society. Our politics, our education system, our infrastructure - anywhere there is a finite amount of power, influence, visibility, wealth, or opportunity. Anywhere in which someone might miss out. There the lure of that promise sustains racism.

White Supremacy is this nation's oldest pyramid scheme. Even those who have lost everything to the scheme are still hanging in there, waiting for their turn to cash out.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“Oh, well, Doremus reflected, he had lived with Emma for thirty-four years, and not oftener than once or twice a year had he wanted to murder her.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“She would nuzzle him, beginning to understand that just because he didn't see something in her didn't mean it wasn't there, knowing there was still some freedom in the way he did not fathom yet how real and how necessary her ruthlessness would be.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories

“Why did we go to such lengths to protect the fragile minds of children? We only robbed them of the truth—and the chance to grow numb to it before it arrived with a hard knock on the door.”
― Sarah Penner, The Lost Apothecary

“I belong in the refrigerator. Because the truth is, I'm just food for a superhero. He'll eat up my death and get the energy he needs to become a legend.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Refrigerator Monologues

“Don't ask me to repent because I regret nothing. You can't save me because I'm not in peril.”
― Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“I liked these echoes of the past, the way a food could rouse a memory from death.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“I felt that our kissing could sustain the ritual of women loving women for eons to come.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“My mother had never known me either, though it wasn't because I hadn't given her a chance. I'd given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn't seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn't even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“She had long ago implanted herself in me at the cellular level, spread into my organs⁠—my brain, my heart⁠—until what was hers and what was mine were indistinguishable.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“People in LA were always recommending things that were more about themselves than the recipient. They recommended obsessively⁠—films, Netflix series⁠—as though their association with a piece of media imbued them with sex appeal, intelligence, an irresistible whimsy. When I felt a recommendation coming on, I'd lie and say I'd already seen the thing: just so I didn't have to hear the plot explained. Did anyone genuinely like anything? So much art was bad. I preferred the work of dead people. At least the dead weren't on Twitter.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“Listen
I am trying to find a way to tell you this.
There are things that trying solves but this
is not one of them.”
― Robert Wood Lynn, Mothman Apologia

“there is no story of this country not founded in forcible vanishings”
― Jamie Hood, How to Be a Good Girl: A Miscellany