Catherine

“Like all children, they knew more than they knew that they knew.”
― Andrea Barrett, Ship Fever: Stories

“A skilled interior designer can look at five shades of blue and distinguish azure, cobalt, ultramarine, royal blue, and cyan. My husband, on the other hand, would call them all blue. My students and I had discovered a similar phenomenon for emotions, which I described as emotional granularity.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“We are, I believe, in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of emotion, the mind, and the brain—a revolution that may compel us to radically rethink such central tenets of our society as our treatments for mental and physical illness, our understanding of personal relationships, our approaches to raising children, and ultimately our view of ourselves. Other scientific disciplines have seen revolutions of this kind, each one a momentous shift away from centuries of common sense. Physics moved from Isaac Newton’s intuitive ideas about time and space to Albert Einstein’s more relative ideas, and eventually to quantum mechanics. In biology, scientists carved up the natural world into fixed species, each having an ideal form, until Charles Darwin introduced the concept of natural selection.”
― Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

“Personally, I thought the game worked in my favor, so I played it. I never had to force myself to love men, and they repaid the compliment. But now I’m nearly fifty. And my problem isn’t that they love me less than they used to. It’s that I find them less attractive. Men don’t age well. You constantly need someone to take care of you, reassure you, understand you, help you, nurse you. It’s too much work. Younger women are right, your masculinity is fragile.”
― Virginie Despentes, Dear Dickhead