S.

“Disabled people can and do have problems . . . However, many of our problems are social, structural, and practical problems that stem from the idea that disabled people are fundamentally flawed, unworthy of inclusion, broken or inadequate. That is ableist thinking.”
― Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement

“Our practice taught me most of all to read like a free, mysterious person who was encountering free, mysterious things; to value the profound privacy and irregularity of my own thinking; to spend time in my head and the heads of others, and to see myself shimmer in many worlds—to let many worlds shimmer, lively, in me.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“Writing is, like gender or dominatricing, a kind of performance. But the craft of writing is primarily an art of making decisions. I often like to terrorize my students by insisting that every single notation—every piece of punctuation, every word, every paragraph break—in a piece of writing is a decision. You know when something is done, I tell them (they always want to know how to know when something is done), when you know the argument for every single choice, when not a single apostrophe has slipped by uninterrogated, when every word has been swapped for its synonym and then recovered. I don’t mean to take the fun out of creation, or even to impose my own laborious process on them, but I actually believe this. Not in the first draft, or even the fifth, but by the end, I want to have stripped as many tics and defaults, as many blind choices as is in my power. I want to be awake to all my choices.”
― Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

“Every boring slice of domesticity, the grocery shopping, the endless errands and chores, the accusations—Did you move my . . .?—these moments made up our life, and I’d wished them gone. I hadn’t understood the tenderness of climbing into bed with you after a stretched-thin day. Of pulling the comforter down and sliding in beside you. Of falling into a dream before we could properly kiss goodnight, but knowing the kiss was still there, hovering between us.”
― Marisa Crane, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself