[quotes] The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 1986

 

"But there's a literary form I haven't mentioned yet: the literature of witness. Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an arc of hope: every recorded story implies a future reader."

"I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely."

"Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing."

"Even though some of them no more than fourteen - Start them soon is the policy, there's not a moment to be lost - still they'll remember. And the ones after them will, for three or four or five years; but after that they won't. They'll always have been in white, in groups of girls; they'll always have been silent."

"Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another.... It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that."

[quotes] Nudge - Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein 2008

  

"The clear lesson here is that consistent and unwavering people, in the private or public sector, can move groups and practices in their preferred direction."

"Small interventions and even coincidences, at a key stage, can produce large variations in the outcome."

"It turns out that if you ask people, the day before the election, whether they intend to vote, you can increase the probability of their voting by as much as 25 percent!"

"One way to start thinking about incentives is to ask four questions about a particular choice architecture:
Who uses?
Who chooses?
Who pays?
Who profits?"

"One solution to the political problem of getting such bills passed may be to use some mental accounting. For example, the revenues from a carbon tax might be paired with a cut in personal tax rates, the funding for Social Security and Medicare, or the provision of universal health insurance. Similarly, the "rights" to pollute in a cap-and-trade system can be auctioned off, and the revenues used in the same way. This linking of costs and benefits might help the pill go down more easily."

"People who want to signal their green credentials are much happier in a Prius than a hybrid Camry because no one will know that the Camry is a hybrid unless she carefully examines some labeling on the car."

"So put it simply, forcing people to choose is not always wise, and remaining neutral is not always possible."

"It is not possible to avoid choice architecture, and in that sense it is not possible to avoid influencing people."

[quotes] Weapons of Math Destruction - Cathy O'Neil 2016

 

"if the people being evaluated are kept in the dark, the thinking goes, they'll be less likely to attempt to game the system. Instead, they'll simply have to work hard, follow the rules, and pray that the model registers and appreciates their efforts."

"So thanks to a highly questionable model, a poor school lost a good teacher, and a rich school, which didn't fire people on the basis of their students' scores, gained one."

"That's how trustworthy models operate. They maintain a constant back-and-forth with whatever in the world they're trying to understand or predict. Conditions change, and so must the model."

"Our own values and desires influence our choices, from the data we choose to collect to the questions we ask. Models are opinions embedded in mathematics."

"... sentencing models that profile a person by his of her circumstances help to create the environment that justifies their assumptions. This destructive model loop goes round and round, and in the process the model becomes more and more unfair."

"A young suburbanite with every advantage - the prep school education, the exhaustive coaching for college admissions tests, the overseas semester in Paris or Shanghai - still flatters himself that it is his skill, hard work, and prodigious problem-solving abilities that have lifted him into a world of privilege. Money vindicates all doubts."

"The top 20 percent of the population controls 89 percent of the wealth in the country, and the bottom 40 percent controls none of it. Their assets are negative: the average household in this enormous and struggling underclass has a net debt of $14,800."

"So even if our model is color blind, the result is anything but. In our largely segregated cities, geography is a highly effective proxy for race."

"The result is that we criminalize poverty, believing all the while that our tools are not only scientific but fair."

"...we've seen time and again that mathematical models can sift through data to locate people who are likely to face great challenges, whether from crime, poverty, or education. It's up to society whether to use that intelligence to reject and punish them - or to reach out to them with the resources they need. We can use the efficiency that make WMDs so pernicious in order to help people."

"... Simpson's Paradox: when a whole body of data displays one trend, yet when broken into subgroups, the opposite trend comes into view for each of those subgroups."

"While that campaign launched into public view, hundreds of others continue to hover below the surface, addressing individual voters."

"As this happens, it will become harder to access the political message our neighbors are seeing - and as result, to understand why they believe what they do, often passionately."

"As is often the case with WMDs, the very same models that inflict damage could be used to humanity's benefit. Instead of targeting people in order to manipulate them, it could line them up for help."

"Many of these models, like some of the WMDs we've discussed, will arrive with the best intentions. But they must also deliver transparency, disclosing the input data they're using as well as the results of their targeting. And they must be open to audits."

[quotes] Dirty Thirty - Asa Akira 2016

 

"There's something about walking around a foreign country by yourself...it's the most anonymous, magical feeling. I feel the most empowered when I do this."

[poems] Pillow Thoughts - Courtney Peppernell 2017

 

this is the first poetry book I've read. here are some of my favorites.

I know what it feels like
for my heart to ache
and my soul to cry.
I know what it feels like
for things to be so hard
it takes everything to get by.
I know what it feels like
when nothing seems steady
and for things to derail.
I know what it feels like
to have person after person
cause your heart to fail.
But one day I hope you see
the love you give yourself
heals all parts eventually.
Until finally she walks in
and sets your heart free
and reminds you why
everyone else
wasn't meant to be.


But life is not about half doing. You cannot half love, or half
accept, or half live. It's about giving everything you have.
When you are old and worn, do you really want to look back
and say you gave the bare minimum? You owe yourself more
than that.

Some things will never be fair for everyone. This is the saddest
realization that the universe can teach. So if they are fair for
you, remember to be grateful.

Even on bad days and cold nights where it feels it has all but
gone. You still have purpose. It has been inside you since the
day you were born. A tiny little firefly born from the light of
the universe. There is a world of reason inside you, an entire
library of thoughts and emotions. For all the moments that
steal your hope, just remember the universe intended for you
to happen. You have purpose.

[quotes] Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Sáenz 2012

 

"I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand."

"The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain."

"Dante who loved kissing dogs, who loved kissing his parents, who loved kissing boys, who even loved kissing girls. Maybe kissing was part of the human condition. Maybe I wasn't human."

"I tried to bring my thoughts back to the kitchen. Where I was. Where I lived. I hated the thing of living in my head."

"To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing."

"High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you - but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher's pens and your parents' pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing."

"'Because I can't stand watching all that loneliness that lives inside you. Because I love you, Ari."

[quotes] Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett 1954

 

"We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?"

[quotes] Notes of a Crocodile - Qiu Miaojim 1994

 

"Being in college gave me a sense of vocation. It exempted me from an oppressive system of social and personal responsibility - from going through the motions like a cog, from being whipped and beaten by everyone for not having worked hard enough and then having to put on a repentant face afterwards."

"Ever since I started to wise up, my family's been perpetually disappointed in me. Though it hurt them, I shattered their image of me little by little. If I didn't, I'd have to sacrifice myself in order to maintain a false ideal. I've been trying really hard to get over my resentment. It's cause them no small amount of pain."

"I'll always feel love for them and have basic needs to be met, so it takes courage to draw the line. But if I don't, my love for them and my needs will become bargaining chips that I have to exchange for my independence."

"'It was one night about two or three years ago when my world started to change. I wasn't really sure what exactly was changing, but suddenly, there I was, in an unfamiliar place."

"As dolphins hear the call of their shared language and must turn back toward their origins, the three of us found ourselves attuned to a common frequency. It was an experience too profound for words."

"Though I don't understand how that's considered love on your part, I'm not negating it either. I guess everyone has a different way of expressing their love. No matter how it comes out, it always finds its way to the person it was meant for. I just didn't know - or care - if it would last."

"As I stood on the edge, you took hold of my heart, and suddenly I realized that somewhere in this great big world, there really was a you that loved me."

"Ever since I was little and started to learn what it meant to love, I never understood that I had to love me too - otherwise, what was the point? If I wanted to join the rest of humanity, the only solution was gradually to reveal my secret."

"'Only healthy people are capable of being in love. Using love to treat an illness just makes the illness even worse.'"

"Man's greatest sorrow is the loss of what was once his greatest desire."

"At Tun Tun's encouragement, I made a big decision: I wasn't going to fall in love with another woman. This time, I was going to make a clean break with the past and pursue a normal happiness."

"The best way for any relationship to end is with the sentiment I wish the best for you, and I am grateful for what we once had together."

"A certain part of me has died as I've learned to leave behind the qualities of my youth - the overanxiousness, oversensitivity, and self-consciousness, not to mention arrogance and idealism, that diminish with life experience. I was a late bloomer, but at long last, I lost my expectations but lacked the self-knowledge to comprehend my own passions and vices."

[quotes] Exile and Pride - Eli Clare 1999

 

"... to divide ourselves for the sake of other people's ease. It grew from standing in doorways we couldn't enter with our whole selves, where our multiple loyalties were attacked as treason instead of being recognized as the richly generative forces they are."

"Instead it keeps issuing this challenging invitation: to bring our whole broken selves to these problems within which we struggle and engage them with all of our beings. Search your pockets. Start jotting down, your own map of contradictions."

"The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies can be stolen, fed lies and poison, torn away from us. They rise up around me - bodies stolen by hunger, war, breast cancer, AIDS, rape; the daily grind of factory, sweatshop, cannery, sawmill; the lynching rope; the freezing streets; the nursing home and prison."

"Will we remember and support Brenda and Wanda Hansen of Camp Sister Spirit, white, rural, working-class lesbians who are building and maintaining lesbian and feminist space in rural Mississippi, when the homophobic violence they face - dead dogs in their mailbox, gunfire at night - no longer makes the headlines?"

"The exclusivity of queer community shaped by urban, middle-class assumptions."

"I want each of us to be able to bring our queerness home."

"If we as a country are finally deciding, after five centuries of white-led cultural and environmental rampage across North America, to save the spotted owl and fragments of its habitat, then we as a people need to be accountable to the folks who will be unemployed, possibly homeless and hungry, because of that decision."

"Yes, Wal-Marts exist across the country. But the development of low-paying service jobs in national and multinational chain stores to the inevitable detriment of locally owned businesses will never be the answer to the economic crises in fishing and logging towns."

"I adore its defiant external edge, its comfortable internal truth. Queer belongs to me."

"I want to hear their stories, but like the stories of other marginalized people, they were most often never told, but rather eaten up, thrown away, lost in the daily grind of survival."

"Marginalized people from many communities create their own internal tensions and hostilities, and disabled people are no exception."

"The construction of gender depends not only upon the male body and female body, but also upon the nondisabled body."

"The tension between the one who is shaking the world up and the one who simply wants an entrance into that world shadows many marginalized, politicized communities today."

"What if instead of fighting on behalf of the shrinking number of people who have jobs with health benefits to be able to share them with spouses, we fight for universal health care?"

"What if instead of fighting for family recognition for lesbian and gay parents through marriage, we fight to end the racist, classist, ableist, homophobic, and transphobic child welfare and family law systems that tear so many families and communities apart?"

[quotes] Born a Crime - Trevor Noah 2016

 

"In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid."

"That's how a police state works - everyone thinks everyone else is the police."

"... he didn't apologize for being racist; he merely apologized for aiming his racism at us."

"Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up from zero."

"The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don't want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money."

"If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet - tweets, Facebook posts, lists - you've read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you've read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that's what hustling was. It's maximal effort put into minimal gain."

"My cry was not a cry of sadness. It was not catharsis. It wasn't me feeling sorry for myself. It was an expression of raw pain that came from an inability of my body to express that pain in any other way, shape, or form."

[quotes] Becoming - Michelle Obama 2018

 

"Even if we didn't know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they'd tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance."

"I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go."

"Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It's vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear."

"Hearing them, I realized that they weren't at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different."

"It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck."

"In Chicago, we'd made the mistake of putting all our hopes for reform on the shoulders of one person without building the political apparatus to support his vision."

"I'd seen just how a handful of votes in every precinct could mean the difference not just between one candidate and another but between one value system and the next. If a few people stayed home in each neighborhood, it could determine what our kids learned in schools, which health-care options we had available, or whether or not we sent our troops to war. Voting was both simple and incredibly effective."

"If you don't get out there and define yourself, you'll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others."

"All we could do then was put our faith into the effort, trusting that with sun and rain and time, something half-decent would push up through the dirt."

"Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient."

"As he saw it, it was part of his responsibility, what he'd been elected to do - to look rather than look away, to stay upright when the rest of us felt ready to fall down."

"You got somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your own mind. Or as Barack had put it that night, you may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be."

"'being president doesn't change who you are; it reveals who you are.'"

"There's power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there's grace in willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become."

[quotes] Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race - Reni Eddo-Lodge 2017

 

"The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings."

"I write - and read - to assure myself that other people have felt what I'm feeling too, that it isn't just me, that this is real, and valid, and true."

"Every voice raised against racism chips away at its power. We can't afford to stay silent. This book is an attempt to speak."

"What history had I inherited that left me alien in my place of birth?"

"We tell ourselves that racism is about moral values, when instead it is about the survival strategy of systemic power."

"White children are taught not to 'see' race, whereas children of colour are taught - often with no explanation - that we must work twice as hard as our white counterparts if we wish to succeed."

"In order to dismantle unjust, racist structures, we must see race. We must see who benefits from their race, who is disproportionately impacted by negative stereotypes about their race, and to who power and privilege is bestowed upon - earned or not - because of their race, their class, and their gender. Seeing race is essential to changing the system."

"There is an unattributed definition of racism that defines it as prejudice plus power. Those disadvantaged by racism can certainly be cruel, vindictive and prejudiced. Everyone has the capacity to be nasty to other people, to judge them before they get to know them. But there simply aren't enough black people in positions of power to enact racism against white people on the kind of grand scale it currently operates against black people."

"'I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice...'"

"She is a white immigrant in Britain, which makes her both an outsider and insider: an outsider because her country has its own culture, and its own well-documented racism, and an insider because her white American-ness will have her positioned as an 'expat' rather than an 'immigrant'."

"At the core of the fear is the belief that anything that doesn't represent white homogeneity exists only to erase it. That multiculturalism is the start of a slippery slope towards the destruction of Western civilization."

"As an adult Harry Potter fan, I'd begun to think of Hermione Granger, with her house-elf liberation campaign, as a well-meaning but guilty-feeling white liberal, taking on a social justice cause with gusto without ever really consulting the views and feelings of the people she was fighting for."

"It was what gave me a framework to begin understanding the world. My feminist thinking gave rise to my anti-racist thinking, serving as a tool that helped me forge a sense of self-worth."

"Feminism, at its best, is a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalised by an ideological system that has been designed for them to fail. That means disabled people, black people, trans people, women and non-binary people, LGB people and working-class people... Feminism will have won when we have ended poverty. It will have won when women are no longer expected to work two jobs (the care and emotional labour for their families as well as their day jobs) by default."

"There is a difference between saying 'we want to be included' and saying 'we want to reconstruct your exclusive system'. The former is more readily accepted into the mainstream."

"Often, there will be no one fighting your corner but yourself. It was black feminist poet Audre Lorde who said: 'your silence will not protect you.' Who wins when we don't speak? Not us."

"If you are disgusted by what you see, and if you feel the fire coursing through your veins, then it's up to you... It doesn't matter what it is, as long as you're doing something."

[quotes] Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari 2014

 

"This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language."

"Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies?"

"Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world."

"This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."

"The numerical success of the calf's species is little consolation for the suffering the individual endures."

"This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution."

"Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers."

"Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted."

"Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something."

"Worse still, even when subject peoples were successful in adopting the imperial culture, it could take decades, if not centuries, until the imperial elite accepted them as part of 'us'."

"Just as Atlantic slave trade did not stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not motivated by animosity. Again, it is fueled by indifference."

"Each year the US population spends more on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world."

"Manchester United fans, vegetarians and environmentalists are other examples. They, too, are defined above all by what they consume."

"However, in order to understand macro-historical processes, we need to examine mass statistics rather than individual stories."

"Still, it's nice when modern research - bolstered by lots of numbers and charts - reaches the same conclusions the ancients did."

"When we try to guess or imagine how happy other people are now, or how people in the past were, we inevitably imagine ourselves in their shoes. But that won't work because it pastes our expectations on to the material conditions of others."

"Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions - none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin."

"As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how."

[quotes] The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck - Mark Manson 2017

 

"You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon."

"Because here's another sneaky little truth about life. You can't be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others."

"Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what's truly fuck-worthy."

"In other words, negative emotions are a call to action."

"Thus entitlement plays out in one of two ways:
1. I'm awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment.
2. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment."

"Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves and everyone else."

"It's easier to sit in a painful certainty that nobody would find you attractive, that nobody appreciates your talents, than to actually test those beliefs and find out for sure."

"We must intellectually strip them away, see their faults and biases, see how they don't fit in with much of the rest of the world, to stare our own ignorance in the face and concede, because our own ignorance is greater than us all."

"The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it."

"These are good, important opportunities that we consistently pass up because they threaten to change how we view and feel about ourselves. They threaten the values that we've chosen and have learned to live up to."

"I say don't find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that's what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others."

"As a general rule, we're all the world's worst observers of ourselves."

"... beliefs are arbitrary; worse yet, they're often made up after the fact to justify whatever values and metrics we've chosen for ourselves."

"That's simply reality: if it feels like it's you versus the world, chances are it's really just you versus yourself."

"... Russia had me reexamining the bullshitty, fake-nice communication that is so common in Anglo culture..."

"Entitled people who blame others for their own emotions and actions do so because they believe that if they constantly paint themselves as victims, eventually someone will come along and save them, and they will receive the love they've always wanted."

"... we suffer from what psychologists refer to as the paradox of choice. Basically, the more options we're given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we're aware of all the other options we're potentially forfeiting."

"Commitment gives you freedom because you're no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous."

"... I came to the startling realization that if there really is no reason to do anything, then there is also no reason to not do anything."

"... in order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever."

"All of human civilization, he says, is basically a result of immortality projects."

[quotes] Small Gods - Terry Pratchett 1992

 

"Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of authority turned."

"There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depend largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God, because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His disapproval."

"There were no lies here. All fancies fled away. That's what happened in all deserts. It was just you, and what you believed."

"'Where there is punishment, there is always a crime,' said Vorbis. 'Somethings the crime follows the punishment, which only serves to prove the foresight of the Great God.'"

"'If you spend your whole time thinking about the universe, you tend to forget the less important bits of it. Like your pants. And ninety-nine out of a hundred ideas they come up with are totally useless.'"

"He thought: the worst thing about Vorbis isn't that he's evil, but that he makes good people do evil. He turns people into things like himself. You can't help it. You catch it off him."

"'Just because you can explain it doesn't mean it's not still a miracle.'"

"'If you muck up people's minds just because you want them to believe in you, what they do it all your fault!'"

"Anything was possible last night. That was the trouble with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings."