I'm a Fan Quotes

“I fit into spaces which already exist and contort myself to fit a shape which has been allocated for me.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“I want to gain immortality because of my brain and not because of the potential of my womb.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“Wanting to be an artist and being one are different. Perhaps I am just like everyone else and my disappointment is desiring to be special but not being special at all. Perhaps my life's purpose is to square myself with this.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“What is the line between being vulnerable and prostrating yourself for a system that won't recognise you? The onus is never on the system to adjust its hardness, it's on you to shape-shift and acquiesce. Do I don vulnerability as a weapon against this culture? - If you require me to be hard and harder to fight you, I will rebel by being soft like a jelly-beaned being, but like anything, you need to be softer and softer to have the same impact. Do I weaponise my own pain and cause harm to myself by revelling in that pain, nurturing it, putting myself in danger to encourage it and then working it over by verbalising it for display, to show society, I am a human being and I feel pain just like you.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“The world is made for couples. Even the unhappy ones.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“I thought time stretched out forever. I thought I had the rest of my life to make this decision. But I realized I am on a clock and it runs differently for me. I am female. There was never much time and I have wasted so much already.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology which has the optics of transparency and democracy? Are they not the beneficiaries of the old, covert systems, descendants of the children of settlers and the children of Empire, left-leaning spawn from right-leaning families, who can pick and choose objects plucked outside of their cultural context in some sort of static menagerie in order to show how innately open-minded they are even as their wealth has been drawn from global structures that decimate the cultures those objects are from? If only we could all be buffered from exploitatively neoliberal regimes by family money and luxuriously austere domestic settings.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“The comments under this post all express urgent, alarmed concern for the sacrificed dishcloth and I think white people are wild for how they will have an acute empathy for anything bar actual melanated human beings.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm A Fan

“Women are beautiful, alluring but terrifying forces and the way to deal with terrifying forces is to break them. ... He cannot bear a woman to have control over him and sees our sexuality as a threat, set out purposefully to destroy him which he must evade at all costs. In his failure to experience and take responsibility for his own sexuality, he seeks to nuke the woman yet simultaneously casts himself as the victim so the woman he is destroying still takes care of him as she is brought down. You collaborate in your own destruction.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“Whiteness and white people make themselves pervasive yet think of themselves as separate. It is parental and condescending in tone—it invented the concept of race conferring upon itself—a freak genetic accident—the values of intelligence, advancement, beauty, whereby the lower the level of melanin in the body, the higher your place in the hierarchy, the lighter the skin tone, the closer you are to whiteness therefore the better, more beautiful you are regarded, the more suited to power you are. The simplicity of this belief is in tandem with its terrible violence.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“I might look innocent but I screenshot a lot”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“Happiness or safety. Or isn't that the same thing?”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“The narratives open to us are the ones based on our identities as it is these stories that are market and social media approved. They have a numbing familiarity to them. We second generation immigrants have the privilege of self-actualisation. We make sculptures, direct films, write plays, novels, memoirs and poems about not having a home, of trying to find a home, of being between two types of home, what is home, of how we all feel ugly, of the mixed relationships we enter into with white people, losing our language from a culture we had a tenuous hold of in the first place, we tell the story of being acted upon, we speak from the position of the victim. For an algorithm not”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“First of all, I didn’t miss the red flags. I looked at them and thought, yeah that’s sexy”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“The man I want to be with wants you most when you do not want him, he prefers the chase. The point at which you become emotionally invested is the exact moment he loses interest. This is met with my own wounding where I want what doesn’t want me. He wants the consistency from a mother and not the conditionality of a lover. When I pointlessly argue and fight with him, I feel like I am fighting the very structures of the old colonial forces, where he has, holds and takes, and I give, offer and ask for nothing in return. We all have teeth in our stomach for him. We are all sacrificed at the altar of his fear.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“As a teenager, I needed to be an ogre at home to frighten my parents so they didn't frighten me. If I breathed fire against them then I would scorch the earth around me to have some semblance of autonomy.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“The validation a relationship bestows upon a woman's personhood still exists and has to be internally fought off if a union hasn't been achieved. The world is built for couples. Even unhappy ones.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“first of all i didn’t miss the red flags i looked at them and thought yeah that’s sexy”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan: A Novel

“I never came with him. I never felt safe enough to.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“By the fact of your gender, you are fundamentally dismissed, and because you are asking for his vulnerability, you become the enemy, you are treated as a hostile invader, with suspicion, surveyed as a constant high-level threat and you will be suppressed or defeated.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“He wants the consistency from a mother and not the conditionality of a lover”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“We are saddened by the knowledge that nothing really collectively changes but reassured by the thought that it did for me on an individual level, as we backstroke across the vast placid sea of righteous superiority.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“He has hungry eyes like a crocodile. Watching from the banks of the river he devours one half-naked woman, then the next.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“He asks me over text, 'What is it with women and taking ages to get ready?' and I spit back, "What the fuck do you know about how long it takes for a woman to get ready? Doesn't seem like your wife looks too long in the mirror.

JESUSSSSSSS CHRISTTTT”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“Men have all this power and this is the world they have created, where everyone experiences only slivers of snatched joy. There is no space for expansive and evolving creativity, only insecurity and homogeny are fostered where straight men uphold one another through a homoerotic bond, or are complicit through silence. No matter how much some say they respect women, each man, even the ‘good ones’, benefit from women’s low expectations of them as control is exerted via a climate of instability, fear and violence.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan: A Novel

“How can he know me when he’s so committed to misunderstanding me.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan: A Novel

“If he could only stop being exactly who he is, we could be happy.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“We are able to ask, who am I, a
question our parents were never able to ask themselves—but have we ever
stopped to ask, what exactly is it we want to gain access to?”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“I do not want to be awake to my deadness.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“I want it so no one else can have it. In the not having, it remains absolutely perfect, in my imagination it would fulfill all my needs, I would never need anyone again. I want it so that in the luxury of having it, I can ruin its perfection and then reject it when I am sure it means nothing.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan