Mandy Fiona

“I envied men’s indifference to personal safety—how they could amble through a dark alley without thinking twice.”
― Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here

“The Facebook document detailed the many ways in which the corporation uses its stores of behavioral surplus to pinpoint the exact moment at which a young person needs a “confidence boost” and is therefore most vulnerable to a specific configuration of advertising cues and nudges: “By monitoring posts, pictures, interactions, and Internet activity, Facebook can work out when young people feel ‘stressed,’ ‘defeated,’ ‘overwhelmed,’ ‘anxious,’ ‘nervous,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘silly,’ ‘useless,’ and a ‘failure.’”20”
― Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

“I feel sort of like I should talk to a psychologist or something about it, but they don’t do stuff like that here, there is no local friendly community health center; you have to ask your GP, who’d send you round the local loony bin for a consultation, and since they’re really big on drugs here, you’d probably just walk out with a prescription.”
― Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty

“And now here you are, sitting in your chair by the window, gazing out urgently, raptly at “your” tree—its shapely green canopy, its black velvety shadows, its sinuously curved trunk, its barky brown bark.”
― Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers