Beatriz Baptista’s Reviews > In the Dream House > Status Update

“"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, (…)”