Lucía > Recent Status Updates

That was what I knew for sure, that this was the only way to get someone to listen to a woman—to tell her story through a man; Trojan horse yourself into a man, and people would give a shit about you. So I wrote heartfelt stories about their lives, extrapolating from what they gave me and running with what I already knew from being human.

They said all the things I wasn’t allowed to say aloud without fear of appearing grandiose or self-centered or conceited or narcissistic. I imposed my narrative onto theirs, like in one of those biology textbooks where you can place the musculature picture over the bone picture of the human body. I wrote about my problems through them.

If you don’t ask too many questions and just let people talk, they’ll tell you what’s on their mind. In those monologues, I found my own gripes. They felt counted out, the way I felt counted out. They felt ignored, the way I felt ignored. They felt like they’d failed. They had regret. They were insecure. They worried about their legacies.

Their problems weren’t real. They had no identity struggle, no illness, no money fears. Instead, they had found the true stuff of their souls—of all our souls—the wound lying beneath all the survivalism and circumstance.

The men hadn’t had any external troubles. They didn’t have a fear that they didn’t belong. They hadn’t had any obstacles. They were born knowing they belonged, and they were reassured at every turn just in case they’d forgotten. But they were still creative and still people, and so they reached for problems out of an artistic sense of yearning.

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if it didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.

Whatever kind of woman you are, even when you’re a lot of kinds of women, you’re still always just a woman, which is to say you’re always a little bit less than a man.

the liver was unique in the way that it healed. It was full of forgiveness. It understood that you needed a few chances before you got your life right. And it wouldn’t just forgive you; it would practically forget. It would allow you to start over in a way that he could not imagine was true in any other avenue of life. We should all be like the liver, he thought. We should all regenerate like this when we’re injured.

Go with what you want instead of what you are supposed to want.

…he couldn’t bear to be with anyone who didn’t yet truly understand consequences, how the world would have its way with you despite all your careful life planning. There was no way to learn that until you lived it. There was no way for any of us to learn that until we lived it.

The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

before we judge them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison or the dodo, but upon its inferior races.

“What is one man’s and one woman’s love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery.”

“Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd.”

“I have by the grace of the ford a mind that can leave misfortune behind”

“Knowledge is a good in itself.”

“the owners were going to make the change. We were to be changed, we were to be freed, just as we had been owned. In history I saw that any freedom has been made, not given.”

“The first thing I did freely, as a free woman, was to shut my door.”

“ it may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.”

“What the rules are. Ways of needing one another. Human ecology.”

“To keep an acceptant spirit. That’s what I learned growing up. To accept. Not to change the world. Only to change the soul. So that it can be in the world. Be rightly in the world.”

“No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.”

“We teach what we know, he thought, and all our knowledge is local.”

“Loquacity is half of diplomacy, Havzhiva had already decided. The other half is silence.”

“Havzhiva thought of justice what an ancient Terran said of another god: I believe in it because it is impossible.”

“What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.”

“Wealth can’t stop,” Granite said to Havzhiva. “It has to keep going. Like the blood circulating. You keep it, it gets stopped—that’s a heart attack. You die.”

No creas que eres alguien especial o mejor que los otros, acuérdate de que al clavo más prominente le cae el martillazo

la nostalgia, el mal de los exiliados

Esas mujeres del campo me enseñaron que el coraje es contagioso y que la fuerza está en el número; lo que no se logra sola se consigue entre varias, y mientras más sean, mejor.