Nina > Nina's Quotes

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“The standard of matrimony is erected by affection and purity, and does not depend upon the height, or bulk, or color, or wealth, or poverty of individuals. Water will seek its level; nature will have free course; and heart will answer to heart.”
― William Lloyd Garrison

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“You were going to the hardware store for milk again,” said Dr. Mahjoub.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“It seemed that as long as I wasn’t actually having sex with a person, I could get off to them. But once they embraced me it was over.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“I wanted to be with her, like all the time. Eliminate the obstacles, the people and things in our lives that were keeping us apart: Brandi, Seth, Kirsten, society, me.
Me? Make that my fear. What was I afraid of, exactly? What other people would think? I guess, a little. But that wasn’t what was stopping me from acting on my feelings. It was the intensity of them. The desire for her. I knew if I gave into it, I’d have to surrender myself completely. I’d lose all control. Everything I knew, everything I was, the walls I’d built up to protect myself all these years would come crashing down. I might get lost in the rubble. Yet, she made me feel alive in a way I'd only ever imagined I could feel. Bells, whistles, music. (Chapter. 15)”
― Julie Anne Peters, Keeping You a Secret

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”
― Wole Soyinka

“The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.”
― Frederick Douglass

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
― Stephen King

“Wanting someone to stand for the national anthem rather than stand up for justice means loving the symbol more than what it symbolizes.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“It isn't the dark you should be afraid of, the girl thought, it's the monsters who step out into the light that you need to fear.”
― Heather Gudenkauf, The Overnight Guest

“Wylie stared down at the woman’s battered face. One mistrustful brown eye looked back at her. Wylie looked down at her own hand, where a matching horseshoe-shaped scar, though less pronounced, marred her palm.”
― Heather Gudenkauf, The Overnight Guest

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“I knew the relationship she’d had with Daphne was forbidden, but it hadn’t occurred to me that most women like Veronica married eventually. Daphne wouldn’t have, but Veronica, I could see, was different. She was more willing to wear a mask.”
― Sarai Walker, The Cherry Robbers

“Growing up, I realized quite quickly that people hate being called racist more than they hate racism itself.”
― Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, Ace of Spades

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Dare to be strong and courageous. That is the road. Venture anything. Be brave enough to dare to be loved.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitious and invisible. You’re everywhere you look, you’re the standard against which everyone else is measured. You’re like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a “woman doctor” or they will say they went to see “the doctor.” People will tell you they have a “gay colleague” or they’ll tell you about a colleague. A white person will be happy to tell you about a “Black friend,” but when that same person simply mentions a “friend,” everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn’t have the word “woman” or “gay” or “minority” in its title is a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses “literature,” “history” or “political science.”

This invisibility is political.”
― Michael S. Kimmel, Privilege: A Reader

“Trump and others on the right want to make sure that working-class white men don’t want to go to college and distrust those who do, and conservative educators want to make sure that people from marginalized communities don’t want to go either. All of this works by design. It is to ensure that enough of us keep our heads down, focus on surviving our nine-to-five jobs, don’t ask questions, and don’t demand more from a system that owes us a lot. The death of American higher education will harm the most vulnerable of us first, but its goal is not to harm or oppress only us—that work is fully implanted in all our systems. Its goal is to continue to oppress and exploit white supremacy’s most powerful tool: the angry white working-class man.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America