Beatriz Baptista > Recent Status Updates

"Basically, what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly."

"What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."

And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl."

curiosa com o que vai acontecer mas odiando a forma como os acontecimentos são relatados (??)

“"My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it off." It's the only true kind of ending.

Sometimes you have to tell a story, and somewhere, you have to stop.

“That there's a real ending to anything is, I'm pretty sure, the lie of all autobiographical writing. You have to choose to stop somewhere. You have to let the reader go.”

“Your body is brilliant, even when you are not. It doesn't just heal--it learns. It remembers. (All of this, of course, if the virus doesn't kill you first.)”

“(…) you can be hurt by people who look just like you. Not only can it happen, it probably will, because the world is full of hurt people who hurt people.

“When it started, I believed I was special. It was a terrible thing to discover that I was common, that everything that happened to me- a crystalline, devastating landscape I navigated in my bare feet--was detailed in books and reports, in statistics. It was terrible because I wanted to believe that my love was unique and my pain was unique, as all of us do.”

“It's not being radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove. In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail.”

+ “Women could abuse other women. Women have abused other women. And queers needed to take this issue seriously, because no one else would.”

“When she was later questioned, the lesbian juror told the lawyer that she hadn't "wanted to convict a [queer] sister," as though the abused girlfriend was not herself a fellow queer woman.” +

“Queer folks fail each other too. This seems like an obvious thing to say; it is not, for example, a surprise to nonwhite queers or trans queers that intracommunity loyalty goes only so far, (…)”

“(…) you are embarrassed about your blood, its redness, the way it is just coming out of you with no concern for anyone's feelings. You are embarrassed to be throwing a party in this state, embarrassed to be alive.”

“The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn't that they'll remember; it's that you'll remember.” — Sarah Manguso

“You have forgotten that leaving is an option.”

“You shouldn't be on this page. There's no way to get here from the choices given to you. You flipped here because you got sick of the cycle. You wanted to get out. You're smarter than me.”

“She was talented but arrogant; brilliant but profoundly selfish.

And yet, there among the trees, seeing the measure of her pain, the proportions of her problems, I felt a stab of sympathy. It couldn't have been easy to be married to her, but it couldn't have been easy to be her, either.”

“Later, retelling stories about this dynamic to my wife, my therapist, the occasional friend, filled me with incandescent rage. "Why do we teach girls that their perspectives are inherently untrust-worthy?" I would yell. I want to reclaim these words—after all, melodrama comes from melos, which means "music," "honey"; a drama queen is, nonetheless, a queen—but they are still hot to the touch.”

“(…) Linda Geraci recalls a fellow lesbian's paraphrasing Pat Parker to her straight acquaintance, "If you want to be my friend, you must do two things. First, forget I am a lesbian. And second, never forget I am a lesbian.'”

“Let it never be said I didn't try.”

“That's what you want. You want an explanation that clears her of responsibility, that permits your relationship to continue unabated. You want to be able to explain to others what she's done without seeing horror on their faces. 'But she was possessed, see.'
'Oh well, that happens to everyone at one time or another, doesn't it'.”

“… and if your family found out they'd probably think it proved every idea they've ever had about lesbians, and you wish she was a man because then at least it could reinforce ideas people had about men, and how she probably wouldn't understand but the last thing queer women need is bad fucking PR, …”

“What does it mean for something to be haunted, exactly? You know the formula instinctually: a place is steeped in tragedy.
Death, at the very least, but so many terrible things can precede death, and it stands to reason that some of them might accomplish something similar.”

“(…) a pile of candy wrapped in multicolored cellophane, (…). But when you get closer and read the description, you understand: it is the weight of the artist's late lover as he began to die of AIDS. Viewers should take a piece of candy, the description says, and at some point it will be replenished. Someone has been replenishing the lost ones since 1991.”

“You agree to go to the museum because art has always had a balancing, effect on your mind; it is a reminder that you are more than a body and its accompanying grief.”

“Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.”

“Maybe this will change someday. Maybe, when queerness is so normal and accepted that finding it will feel less like entering paradise and more like the claiming of your own body: imperfect, but yours.”

“A reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.”