Faith Rice-Mills > Faith's Quotes

“The labor of love begins, then, in the home. We are still told that the work of cleaning and cooking, of nursing wounds, of teaching children to walk and talk and read and reason, of soothing hurt feelings and smoothing over little crises, comes naturally to women. These things are assumed not to be skills, not to be learned, as other skills are, through practice. And this assumption has crept from the home into the workplaces of millions of people—not all of them women—and has left them underpaid, overstretched, and devalued. Our willingness to accede that women’s work is love, and that love is its own reward, not to be sullied with money, creates profits for capital.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“the work of parenting is not considered important enough to pay for, yet if you demonstrate that you have other priorities beyond the home, you’ll be castigated as a bad mother.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“Hey, I know what would totally cheer up this day,” Emily says, a conspiratorial smile on her face. If you vanished? I think to myself, then immediately feel bad. Girls should be nice to other girls. Lift them up instead of tearing them down, as Mom would say. Besides, Emily hasn’t done anything wrong, really.”
― Lindsay Currie, Scritch Scratch

“You feel punished for having a child by yourself as a single woman. Motherhood is throwing a lot of women into poverty. Or, a lot of women just make the decision, ‘I can’t afford to have a child.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“love Ms. Mancini. She’s the only teacher I have who wouldn’t shame a student for falling asleep in class. I think she remembers what it was like to be in seventh grade and that’s what makes her so good at her job.”
― Lindsay Currie, Scritch Scratch

“For decades, for the housewife, keeping a tidy, loving home had been a task deeply tied up with her identity. To fail to keep a good home was to fail to be a good woman.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“My mom has worked her way down to the court and heads straight over to me. “I’m so proud of you, honey!” “Thanks, Ma, but we lost.” “I don’t care. Just seeing you out there, playing so well. I enjoy it so much.” “Cool.” I love that watching me play makes her happy. I don’t love that it’s one of the only things that makes her happy.”
― Tommy Greenwald, Rivals:

“Teachers like Jimenez in the United States make something like 21 percent less than workers with similar education levels in other fields, and yet for all that they sacrifice—for all that they love their work—they are still often blamed when students fail to transcend the circumstances in which they live. Teachers tend to stick it out, staying on the job even as budget cuts mean class sizes grow and resources shrink—and even as they buy toilet paper and food for their students out of their own paychecks.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“From the beginning of publicly funded schooling in the United States (and Europe), teachers have been pressed to treat their work as a calling, to dedicate long hours outside of the classroom to it, and to do this out of care for their students. Yet such expectations have existed in tension with the idea that teachers’ skills are little more than a “natural” inclination to care for children, rooted in a love that is simultaneously too big and too unimportant to be fairly remunerated. Like the work done in the home—paid or unpaid—teachers’ work is considered both necessary and not really work at”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“FOR A WHILE, TEACHERS ACQUIESCED TO THE CHANGES. “WE’RE USED TO being like, ‘OK, whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it, because we all care about what’s best for kids,”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“The work it takes to suppress one’s true feelings, to maintain a calm smile and the appearance of enjoyment, in order to maintain the customer’s mood is familiar to anyone who works with people.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“Japanese workers have been subjected to a “smile scanner” that gauges how well they project happiness on the job—an automated test of emotional labor.”
― Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

“Yes. Some of the children call them See-Pees; some of the adults, too, I'm sorry to say. Nate prefers they be called Napowesipe or Neshnabek, which are their tribal names. I do, too. Shortening their names to See-Pees is as shameful as having our ancestors' beautiful names changed to things like Toby.”
― Beverly Jenkins, Vivid

“think an accent is like your very own unique signature of all the places you’ve been. Like stamps in a passport. It has nothing to do with where you’re going.”
― Kelly Yang, Three Keys

“believe it’s because the gods are envious of us. They will never understand the beauty of watching the day pass and knowing that it could perhaps be your last. They will never experience the bitter taste of fear as it floods your senses, or the sometimes bittersweet ache of pain. They also fear us because they understand that whipped backs will always heal, and eventually they will no longer bow.”
― Claire M. Andrews, Daughter of Sparta

“Humans suck, man. We think we’re so damn indestructible and infinite because we can think and take care of ourselves, unlike pay phones or books, but I bet the dinosaurs thought they’d rule forever too.”
― Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End

“This loaded question is the reason I didn’t want anyone to know I was dying. There are questions I can’t answer. I cannot tell you how you will survive without me. I cannot tell you how to mourn me. I cannot convince you to not feel guilty if you forget the anniversary of my death, or if you realize days or weeks or months have gone by without thinking about me. I just want you to live.”
― Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End

“Rip sighs and scrubs his hands down his face in a rare crack of his stony facade. “You’re overreacting.”
― Raven Kennedy, Gleam