Sotto > Sotto's Quotes

“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.”
― E.M. Forster

“I don't like cleaning or dusting or cooking or doing dishes, or any of those things," I explained to her. "And I don't usually do it. I find it boring, you see."

"Everyone has to do those things," she said.

"Rich people don't," I pointed out.

Juniper laughed, as she often did at things I said in those early days, but at once became quite serious.

"They miss a lot of fun," she said. "But quite apart from that--keeping yourself clean, preparing the food you are going to eat, clearing it away afterward--that's what life's about, Wise Child. When people forget that, or lose touch with it, then they lose touch with other important things as well."

"Men don't do those things."

"Exactly. Also, as you clean the house up, it gives you time to tidy yourself up inside--you'll see.”
― Monica Furlong, Wise Child

“And Kelsea wondered suddenly whether humanity ever actually changed. Did people grow and learn at all as the centuries past? Or was humanity merely like the tide, enlightenment advancing and then retreating as circumstances shifted? The most defining characteristic of the species might be lapse.”
― Erika Johansen, The Invasion of the Tearling

“As adult women, those of us who are heterosexual sometimes have a sense of a lost Eden. We are determined to seek out a love as perfect again: a love at once so intimate and so charged, to be once more as teenage girls are when they are in love with each other. This is why teen idols - the David Cassidys and the Bobby Shermans, or later, the Bay City Rollers - always look like girls. They are out disguises; they are cover for these feelings.”
― Naomi Wolf

“Because of the new dangers that awaited us in the form of "bad men" of all kinds, we were at once obsessed with physical freedom and fearful of it. Soon we understood that boys were, in effect, our bodyguards. A girl learns that the ecstasy of physical exploration is something she can now enjoy safely only in the presence of a boy. She intuits that the very same developing body that can carry her farther than her dependent childhood body ever could has suddenly made her a target as well.”
― Naomi Wolf

“We are relentlessly encouraged by tech companies to think of their technology as enabling human processes, making human actions more efficient. Do your bookkeeping better! Find a restaurant more easily! Talk to a loved one far away! In fact, the business models of most tech giants, and especially social media giants, most thrive when they have replaced human experience and human actions. And now they have moved on to suppressing human experience and human actions.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human

“I think that we who were small in the early sixties were perhaps the last generation of Americans who actually had a childhood, in the Victorian and post-Victorian sense of childhood as a space distinct in its roles and customs from the world of adults, oriented around children's own needs and culture rather than around the needs and culture of adults.”
― Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

“She is built like an armchair, more upholstered than clothed.”
― Imogen Hermes Gowar, The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock

“And yours is what is called a house of ill repute.’
‘Nobody calls my house that. I have an excellent reputation.”
― Imogen Hermes Gowar, The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity.”
― Epicurus

“Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”
― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
― George Santayana

“For any one woman to outgrow the myth, she needs the support of many women. The toughest but most necessary change will come not from men or from the media, but from women, in the way we see and behave toward other women,”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women—a Feminist Critique on Society's Obsession with Flawless Women