Breathing Machine Quotes

“A wall-to-wall Instagram reel of flirtatious young women doing selfies and documenting the gaps in their thighs isn’t a zoetrope of inconsequential self-involvement, so much as a reclamation of the lens: The young and bewildered women who blinked innocently from the dark corners of the early web are holding the camera now, controlling their own images, setting the terms of engagement.”
― Leigh Alexander, Breathing Machine: Growing Up in the Digital Age

“By the time I was in fourth grade, the teacher had already called my parents more than once to say they did not think I could tell fantasy from reality. I could tell. I could. I just didn’t want to. I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I wailed, marched out to the hallway bench. Again.”
― Leigh Alexander, Breathing Machine: A Memoir of Computers

“Today, digital historians call Colossal Cave Adventure the “granddaddy” of text adventure games. A spelunker named Will Crowther made it for his daughters, to help show them his cave-crawling pastime as he endured a divorce with his wife. His work parented Charlotte and I all those summers, in a different era, when it felt like we children could lock ourselves away and go absent for hours without making our parents afraid.”
― Leigh Alexander, Breathing Machine: Growing Up in the Digital Age