

“The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with disappointment...Held up against certain ideals of success, his life has been a deep disappointment. But he can also see that it is, in the end, no great achievement simply to fixate on the failure. There is valour in being able to identify a forgiving, hopeful perspective on one’s life, in knowing how to be a friend to oneself, because one has a responsibility to others to endure.”
― The Course of Love
― The Course of Love

“Positive thinking did not abolish the need for constant vigilance; it only turned that vigilance inward. Instead of worrying that one’s roof might collapse or one’s job be terminated, positive thinking encourages us to worry about the negative expectations themselves and subject them to continual revision. It ends up imposing a mental discipline as exacting as that of the Calvinism it replaced—the endless work of self-examination and self-control or, in the case of positive thinking, self-hypnosis. It requires, as historian Donald Meyer puts it, “constant repetition of its spirit lifters, constant alertness against impossibility perspectives, constant monitoring of rebellions of body and mind against control. This is a burden that we can finally, in good conscience, put down.”
― Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
― Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“We know by now that Asiatic femininity in the Western racial imagination has never needed the biological or the natural to achieve a full, sensorial, agile, and vivid presence. Asiatic femininity has always been prosthetic. The dream of the yellow woman subsumes a dream about the inorganic. She is an, if not the, original cyborg.”
― Ornamentalism
― Ornamentalism

“In a crisis, do not remain calm, do not look for the nearest exit, do not stick your head in the sand; do agitate, do make things worse, do run screaming through the street, and do refuse to return to business as usual. Business as usual is what created this mess in the first place. Business as usual has meant that businesspeople and corporate fat cats run/ruin the world and artists are out of luck; it has meant that education, spirituality, sexuality all must function on a business model and every attempt to make changes is greeted with a pragmatic question about whether changing things will also mean making money. Making money cannot be the goal of the new feminism. Putting women in positions of power is not what gaga feminism wants. What gaga feminism wants cannot be easily summarized, but it is not an independent bank account, not a profitable nonprofit; mama does not want a brand new bag. Mama wants revolution.”
― Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal
― Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal
Yasmin’s 2024 Year in Books
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