Nabil > Nabil's Quotes

“He’s not so short,” said Ekaterin defensively. “He’s just . . . concentrated.” Her”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Komarr

“Just as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state. In both cases, the lack of recognition that the past is not the present leads to the newly acquired power to punish rather than to the self-transformation necessary to resolve conflict and produce justice.”
― Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

“We were discussing a subject that was quite prominent at the time, the trend for lesbian biological mothers to use the absence of legal relationship recognition to deny custody to former female partners who had fully participated in raising a child. We were discussing the cruelty to the former partner and to the child, the vindictiveness, the destruction of the community, the endless longing and irresolution that it produces, and I asked Kendell how these women justified these actions. “It’s the cadre of friends,” she said. This insight has stayed with me ever since. There is often a “cadre” of bad friends around a person encouraging them to do things that are morally wrong, unjustified, and unethical,”
― Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

“There is often a “cadre” of bad friends around a person encouraging them to do things that are morally wrong, unjustified, and unethical,”
― Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

“What I mean is that, if a lot of queer energy, say around adolescence, goes into what Barthes calls “le vouloir-être-intelligent” (as in “If I have to be miserable, at least let me be brainier than everybody else”), accounting in large part for paranoia’s enormous prestige as the very signature of smartness (a smartness that smarts), a lot of queer energy, later on, goes into … practices aimed at taking the terror out of error, at making the making of mistakes sexy, creative, even cognitively powerful. Doesn’t reading queer mean learning, among other things, that mistakes can be good rather than bad surprises?25”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction

“This is because the caress is not a simple stroking; it is a shaping.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction

“We discuss things, rather than ideas; we exchange information, not theories; we keep ourselves steady by thinking about the particular. The general is frightening.”
― Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“want revenge. I want power. I want money. I want to be loved and not love in return.”
― Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“even as she says it, sees love drain out of his eyes: and somehow, as a stream, which seeks its own level, it flows over into hers, and her fate is sealed. The less he loves, the more she will.”
― Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“for a man functions best if he ventures out into the world from a domestic setting in which his restless sexual and procreative energies are given liberty.”
― Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“Up there on Olympus, where he’d been raised, where the mountain of reason pierces the sky of the intellect, the talk was all of how the soul suffered if the senses were gratified. Polly Patch would not allow it. She claimed, as the Devil would, that the senses and the soul were one: that gratifying one was to gratify the other.”
― Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“The gist had been that institutions, even individual departments in governments, were the concrete embodiments of not just ideas or opinions but also of attitudes and emotions. Like hate or empathy, statements such as “immigrants need to learn English or they’re not really citizens” or “all mental patients deserve our respect.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“Someone says something you consider problematic. At first you try not to say anything. But they keep saying something. So maybe you respond, carefully, perhaps. You say why you think what they have said is problematic. You might be speaking quietly, but you are beginning to feel wound up, recognizing with frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. The feminist killjoy appears here: when she speaks, she seems wound up. I appear here. This is my history: wound up.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“The family is performed by witnessing her being wound up, spinning around.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“Rolling eyes = feminist pedagogy.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“And then your frustration can be taken as evidence of your frustration, that you speak this way, about this or that, because you are frustrated. It is frustrating to be heard as frustrated; it can make you angry that you are heard as angry.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“We are dismissed as emotional. It is enough to make you emotional.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“We become a problem when we describe a problem.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“Alienation is studious; you learn more about wishes when they are not what you wish for.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“What does it mean to redirect children out of fear that they would be unhappy?”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“To want happiness for a child can be to want to straighten the child out.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“that in some parental responses to a child coming out, this unhappiness is expressed not so much as being unhappy about the child being queer, but as being unhappy about the child being unhappy.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“No wonder then that the social struggle within families involves a struggle over the causes of unhappiness. Perhaps the parents are unhappy as they think their daughter will be unhappy if she is queer. They are unhappy with her being unhappy. The daughter is unhappy because they are unhappy with her being queer. Perhaps the parents would then witness the daughter’s unhappiness as a confirmation of their fear: that she will be unhappy because she is queer. Even happy queers would become unhappy at this point.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“Translation: happiness becomes proximity to whiteness. Camel Gupta (2014) notes how it is sometimes assumed that brown queers and trans folk are rescued from unhappy brown families by happy white queer and trans communities. We are not a rescue mission. But when you deviate, they celebrate. Even happy brown queers would become unhappy at this point.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“You can kill joy by not looking happy enough. If”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“I was profoundly shy growing up, and my sense of human sociality was of something from which I was barred: almost like a room with a locked door for which I did not have the key. Perhaps that was it: gender seemed like a key to a lock, which I did not have, or which I did not fit. Looking back, I think I decided to self-girl when I went to university, as I was exhausted by not fitting or not fitting in.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“I looked in the mirror sadly and waited for a different version of myself to appear.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“And note then: you can killjoy not as a deliberate or intentional act; you might even be trying to participate in the joy of others. You can killjoy because you are not properly attuned to the requirements of a social system.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“When we have to think strategically, we also have to accept our complicity: we forgo any illusions of purity; we give up the safety of exteriority. If we are not exterior to the problem under investigation, we too are the problem under investigation. Diversity work is messy, even dirty, work.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life