Susannah Champlin

“I was cold, I’ve been told. I often write stories about women who are perceived as cold and resent that perception. I write these women because I know what it’s like to have so much warmth roiling beneath the skin’s surface, ready to be found. I am not cold. I wasn’t ever cold. My warmth was hidden far away from anything that could bring hurt because I knew I didn’t have the inner scaffolding to endure any more hurt in those protected places.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“Any critical engagement with racism requires us to understand the tyranny of the universal. For most of our history, the very category "human" has not embraced Black people and people of color. Its abstractness has been colored white and gendered male...If indeed all lives mattered, we would not need to emphatically proclaim Black Lives Matter.”
― Angela Davis

“The best way to instill social values is to eroticize them...We can decode social priorities through looking at what's most commonly eroticized: male power and female submission, male violence and female pain. The most generically sexual images of women involve silence, performance, and artificiality: traits that leave male power intact and strengthened, by draining women's energy and wasting our time. Women are definitionally powerless in any of these situations, and certainly women have subverted and diversified sexual archetypes to far more aesthetically interesting ends. But still, it's worth paying attention to whatever cultural products draw straightforwardly on sex to gain position, even and especially if women are driving that concept.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“what i miss most is how you loved me. but what i didn't know was how you loved me had so much to do with the person i was. it was a reflection of everything i gave you. coming back to me. how did i not see that. how. did i sit here soaking in the idea that no one else would love me that way. when it was i that taught you. when it was i that showed you how to fill. the way i needed to be filled. how cruel i was to myself. giving you credit for my warmth simply because you had felt it. thinking it was you who gave me strength. wit. beauty. simply because you recognized it. as if i was already not these things before i met you. as if i did not remain all these things after you left.”
― Rupi Kaur, Milk and honey