Lori

“If men knew how often women are filled with white-hot rage when we cry, they would be staggered, I remember someone saying the other day, through the groaning static of my house's ancient intercom system. We self-objectify and lose the ability to even recognize the physiological changes that indicate anger. Mainly, though, we get sick. And oh, how true that is: We sicken, we are consumed, laughing wild amidst severest woe. We flourish with illnesses that have no cure and a thousand different names. Hysteria, the lung, wandering womb syndrome. Our own immune systems turn against us, fight us as if we ourselves were diseases, infestations. We wither, we swell, miscarry, grow phantom pregnancies, ingest our babies and turn them to stone. Our wounds fester, turn inside-out. Our equipment rusts and degenerates from over-use or lack of use or potential for use alike, decays within us, sliming blackly over the rest of our pulsing, stuttering interiors. Things get lost inside us: penises, forceps, scalpels. No maps to the interior. And every once in a while, we simply flush our systems without adequate warning, drooling blood in clots from inconvenient areas, dropping squalling flesh-lumps everywhere—in trash-cans, in bathrooms, shoved under beds and swaddled in bloodied plastic, buried shallowly, immured behind walls that bulge with black mould-stains, pumping out flies.”
― Gemma Files, Hymns of Abomination

“However, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” only works as clichéd shorthand; in reality the enemy of my enemy may be my enemy as well. Being caught between groups that hate you for different aspects of your identity means none of you are safe.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“When an acquaintance commiserated upon hearing of the loss of America’s capital, Franklin replied, “You mistake the matter. Instead of Howe taking Philadelphia, Philadelphia has taken Howe.”
― H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

“Show me just *one* group that has won its freedom with facts, ‘reasoned’ arguments, thoughtful ideas, and loud debates. Just one.”
― b. binaohan, i just want freedom