Jacob Petersen

“I could perhaps have stayed on at UCLA, living in my little house in Topanga Canyon, but I felt I needed to move on and specifically to go to New York. I felt that I was enjoying California too much, was getting addicted to an easy, sleazy life, to say nothing of a deepening drug addiction. I felt I needed to go to a hard, real place, a place where I could devote myself to work and perhaps discover or create a real identity, a voice of my own.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“I found it deeply unfair that he’d known what he was going to say before I knew the conversation would even happen. Logically, I knew this was not a valid complaint. You had to arrange things in your head before you said them aloud, and it was a fact of leaving that one person knew before the other did. Really my grievance was that he was in charge and not me. But I couldn’t conscript him into staying with me, and anyway I didn’t like him very much.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“I knew I’d do anything for money. Throughout college back in Ireland, I’d kept a savings account that I charmingly termed “abortion fund.” It had €1,500 in it by the end. I knew some women who saved with their friends, and they all helped whoever was unlucky. But I didn’t trust anyone. I got the money together by waitressing, then kept adding to it after I had enough for a procedure in England. I liked watching the balance go up. The richer I got, the harder it would be for anyone to force me to do anything.”
― Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan” is how Roosevelt’s speech began. Note that in this formulation Japan is an “empire,” but the United States is not. Note also the emphasis on the date. It was only at Hawai‘i and Midway, of all Japan’s targets, that the vagaries of the international date line put the event on December 7. Everywhere else, it occurred on December 8, the date the Japanese use to refer to the attack.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States