Catapult > Catapult's Quotes

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”
― Muriel Rukeyser

“[Women] are conditioned to ever prove ourselves, as if our value is contingent on our ability to meet the expectations of others. As if our worth is a tank forever draining that we must fill and fill. We complete tasks and in some half-buried way believe that if we don’t, we will be discredited. Sometimes, this is true. But here is a question: Do you want to be a reliable source of literary art (or whatever writing you do), or of prompt emails?”
― Melissa Febos

“Insomnia, then, is not just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.”
― Marina Benjamin, Insomnia

“In insomnia we encounter the very heart of love’s darkness: the essential otherness of the beloved.”
― Marina Benjamin, Insomnia

“Be courageous, not brave. Bravery was to dash out of the bomb shelter and grab the child left crying on the veranda. Courage was to go to the stream the day after a bomb had scattered your friend on that path because water must be fetched to sustain the life that was left.”
― Chibundu Onuzo, Welcome to Lagos

“To be a hero, I thought, you had to be beautiful and adored. To be beautiful and adored, you had to be white. That there were millions of Asian girls like me out there in the world, starring in their own dramas large and small, had not yet occurred to me, as I had neither lived nor seen it.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“As my thoughts reached out to them, all at once I could envision hundreds of gossamer-thin threads of history and love, curiosity and memory, built up slowly across the time and space between us—a web of connections too delicate to be seen or touched, too strong to be completely severed.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“He had started out as a snag, a snag in the composition; from one moment to the next, there was no other way of putting it, he had begun to appear in my life back in the city. And since all appearances are ultimately disturbances, this disturbance needed investigating.”
― Chloe Aridjis, Sea Monsters

“There are two kinds of romantics, my older cousin had explained, the kind who is constantly falling in love and simply needs a person into whom they can pour every thought, dream, and project, and the kind of romantic who remains alone, waiting and waiting for the right person to arrive, a person who may not even exist. It was too early to know which kind I would be.”
― Chloe Aridjis, Sea Monsters

“If I stayed in much longer I was certain I would dissolve, there were probably hundreds of dissolved bodies in the ocean, swirling around with the shells and seaweed, that’s what happens when you immerse yourself too fully in any vastness, you eventually become part of it, part of the landscape, quite literally.”
― Chloe Aridjis, Sea Monsters

“The guilt helped him instinctively understand what he would consciously later learn, that a man’s character is determined by how he chooses to wield the power he has over others.”
― Rabeah Ghaffari, To Keep the Sun Alive

“The boys who had argued were his age, eighteen, and already so convinced of their beliefs they were willing to hate each other. Whatever the cruelty of nature, animals, fish and birds never sought revenge or redress. So why did all human cruelties and injustices have to be accounted for?”
― Rabeah Ghaffari, To Keep the Sun Alive

“Perhaps if I had said to myself, at any moment in the race, I am being competitive. I want to win and I care, I might’ve begun to find the whole competition boring. My competitiveness was like a kite I was refusing to pull down from the sky and examine. I think this increased its power over me. I rode with a mysterious compulsion, not knowing where it came from.”
― Lara Prior-Palmer, Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race

“Travellers can go out into the world with their devices and prejudices intact to smooth their journeys. Yet, etymologically, a traveller is the one who suffers—or at least, one who works (travail). The traveller forgets she’s going home, and forgets herself, too.”
― Lara Prior-Palmer, Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race

“Isn’t all artwork—or all decent art—a mirror? Might a great painting not even reformulate the question what is it about to what am I about? Isn’t theory also in some sense always autobiography?”
― María Gainza, El nervio óptico

“I never used to resort to quotations very much but in these past months I have read like a convict—yes, a convict, that’s the word. I have also realized that being good with quotations means avoiding having to think for oneself.”
― María Gainza, El nervio óptico

“Some details are lost to time, and in fact it’s for the best. To ever feel that you understand anything only means that your mind has turned rigid.”
― María Gainza, El nervio óptico

“. . . But what are you really thinking and feeling, my hostess of the air, as you spend all your waking days suspended between sky and earth?”
― Jokha Alharthi (translated by Marilyn Booth), Celestial Bodies

“She wanted someone ... who worked with his hands and not with words. Want. She wanted. She needed. The words resounded in her head as she went out the door to the street. And maybe it was the cool wind that hit her in the face, or the moon that still hung in the sky, full and yellow, or the fact that she was still drunk and was going back to her bed alone at one thirty in the morning, but the words hurt her. She felt again, for the second time that night, humiliated and sick of herself.”
― Paulina Flores, Humiliation

“They say perhaps we cry when language fails, when words can no longer adequately convey our hurt.”
― Heather Christle, The Crying Book

“The gaps that bind us span more than the distances between words.”
― Jessica J Lee, Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts

“You may not like what you see, but you will see me, motherfucker. My very being is an act of defiance.”
― Sophia Chang, The Baddest Bitch in the Room: A Memoir

“White women can oscillate between their gender and their race, between being the oppressed and the oppressor. Women of color are never permitted to exist outside of these constraints: we are both women and people of color and we are always seen and treated as such.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“This weaponization of White Womanhood continues to be the centerpiece of an arsenal used to maintain the status quo and punish anyone who dares challenge it.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“Yes, it is true women of color have been the targets of a setup of monumental proportions, something that amounts to nothing short of a covert war against us. But it is also true that these attacks are their own proof of just how serious a threat to the status quo all women of color really are. So serious, in fact, that the very concept of the innocent white woman was constructed to keep us firmly in our place.”
― Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

“...I missed even the idea of home. But it seems to me that if you are someone who leaves, then you must always be leaving, because to stop leaving is to stay, which holds its own consequences. The space between staying and leaving, I think, is called longing.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“Sometimes, though no one ever asks, I say that it was moving to the East Coast that led me to understand that I was raced—to understand that the gaze upon my body bore the effects of a system far larger than me. I could no longer think of myself as a neutral subject; no one was, and in that realization there was a kind of relief. Emboldened by my reading, I began to consider my own Asian-Americanness, and within it to draw a distinction between East and Southeast Asian, finally acknowledging the effects of being a repeatedly colonized subject—the ways women who looked like me had been degraded and degraded. Because I was emphatically a brown girl fucking, I related to the term ABJECT so much that I made endless puns about it: ABJECT PERMENANCE, ABJECT STORY, ABJECT OF YOUR AFFECTION. For that was how I felt, melodramatic as it was: cast-off, objectified. Kristeva was the spotlight that illuminated my condition.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“It's a crush because it's not real. Not yet, not maybe ever. I'd be content to spend forever in this liminal, cresting place, the interval before we know each other.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy