“Living your life according to what everyone else might think of you is to cede control of who you are. It is to outsource your identity to a bunch of strangers who do not know you.”
Tag: Feminism
Intimations
“What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence. Strange inversions proliferate. People find themselves applauding a national health service that their own government criminally underfunded and neglected these past ten years. People thank God for ‘essential’ workers they once considered lowly, who not so long ago they despised for wanting fifteen bucks an hour.”
Salt Slow
“In the midst of all these haunted people, she sat alone, without a ghost yet longing for one, her writing like a clasp of fingers around empty air.”
Milkman
“At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were – if no physically violent touch was being laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn’t there? At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment.”
Girl, Woman, Other
“Be a person with knowledge, not just opinions.”
Tomorrow’s Woman
Every poetry anthology I read, I write a comment like, “I don’t read poetry that often BUT I actually really loved this”. Why?
Whose Story Is This?
“We are, as a culture, moving to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future.”
I Feel Bad About My Neck
“Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're thirty-four.”
The Testaments
“You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”
The Handmaid’s Tale
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
