[quotes] Kink Stories - edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell 2021

  

"But they also recognize that all experience is embodied, and that bodies are always situated in the realities of history and culture, the crucibles of class, race, nationhood, and gender. By taking kink seriously, these stories recognize how the questions raised in intimate, kinky encounters - questions of power, agency, identity - can help us to interrogate and begin to re-script the larger cultural narratives that surround us."

"What could be off about this? So he kissed the top of her head, the white pure line of her part, and hoped the touch would say what needed to be said, whatever it was. He was so tired, he realized, of not knowing that he was supposed to do or say."

"His life at the time was a series of minor discomforts that accumulated like grit in a socket until rotation was no longer possible."

"They were committing a sacred act, sewing him back into his body. Omar imaged his ancestors engaged in this same straining, this same rhythm, generations of lovers reaching into that same hot center."

"This must be love because I feel myself expanding in his gaze."

[quotes] Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer 2013

 

[this book captures my love for the world in so many ways and has given me the language to see that the world loves me too. Some ideas not included in the quotes: how to become a naturalized person in the land you live in, the three sisters.]

"On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast."

"Nuts were designed to be brought inside, to save for later in a chipmunk's cache, or in the root cellar of an Oklahoma cabin. In the way of all hoards, some will surely be forgotten - and then a tree is born."

"Such communal generosity might seem incompatible with the process of evolution, which invokes the imperative of individual survival."

"Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it."

"But that is exactly the point. A gift is something for nothing, except that certain obligations are attached. For the plant to be sacred, it cannot be sold."

"That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage."

"Gratitude was the only currency accepted here. It was all a gift. It was like picking strawberries in my field: the merchants were just intermediaries passing on gifts from the earth."

"It's funny: Had all the things in the market merely been a very low price, I probably would have scooped up as much as I could. But when everything became a gift, I felt self-restraint. I didn't want to take too much."

"Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft."

"There are those who will try to sell the gifts, but, as Wally says of sweetgrass for sale, 'Don't buy it.' Refusal to participate is a moral choice. Water is a gift for all, not meant to be bought and sold. Don't buy it. When food has been wrenched from the earth, depleting the soil and poisoning our relatives in the name of higher yields, don't buy it."

"That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist."

"After the drumbeat of my mother's heart, this was my first language."

"I simply gave myself up to the task. I remember the liberation of just walking right in to my waist the first time, the lightness of my T-shirt floating around me, the swirl of the water against my bare skin."

"What I'm looking for, I suppose, is balance, and that is a moving target. Balance is not a passive resting place - it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in."

"The pond built my muscles, wove my basked, mulched my garden, made my tea, and trellised my morning glories. Our lives became entwined in ways both material and spiritual. It's been a balanced exchange: I worked on the pond and the pond worked on me, and together we made a good home."

"A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn't end until she creates a home where all of life's beings can flourish. There are grandchildren to nurture, and frog children, nestlings, goslings, seedlings, and spores, and I still want to be a good mother."

"In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness."

"Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them."

"Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond."

"Something essential happens in a vegetable garden. It's a place where if you can't say 'I love you' out loud, you can say it in seeds. And the land will reciprocate, in beans."

"Traditional harvesters recognize the individuality of each tree as a person, a nonhuman forest person. Trees are not taken, but requested. Respectfully, the cutter explains his purpose and the tree is asked permission for harvest. Sometimes the answer is no."

"The work of being a human is finding balance, and making splints will not let you forget it."

"John keeps to the tradition of the Honorable Harvest: take only what you need and use everything you take."

"Just about everything we use is the result of another's life, but that simple reality is rarely acknowledged in our society."

"For me, writing is an act of reciprocity with the world; it is what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me. And now there's another layer of responsibility, writing on a thin sheet of tree and hoping the words are worth it."

"What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect? Once you start, it's hard to stop, and you begin to feel yourself awash in gifts."

"When my kids were in school they had to memorize the Bill of Rights, but I would venture to guess that maple seedlings would be schooled instead in a Bill of Responsibilities."

"But this generosity is beyond my realm, as I am a mere heterotroph, a feeder on the carbon transmuted by others. In other to live, I must consume. That's the way the world works, the exchange of a life for a life, the endless cycling between my body and the body of the world."

"Collectively, the indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest."

"One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence."

"Isn't this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?"

"Instead I just stand there, tears running down my cheeks in nameless emotion that tastes of joy and of grief. Joy for the being of the shimmering world and grief for what we have lost."

"When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. Is is a prism through which to see the world."

"A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit."

"I suppose he achieved what he had been taught to want, a better life for his children and grandchildren, the American life he was taught to honor. My mind thanks him for his sacrifice, but my heart grieves for the one who could have told me stories of sweetgrass. All my life I have felt that loss."

"Ear of stone, will you hear our anguish when we understand that we have done? The harsh post-glacial world in which you began may well become our own unless we listen to the wisdom carried in the mutualistic marriage of your bodies."

"To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it."

"Inside looking out, I could not bear the loneliness of being dry in a wet world. Here in the rainforest, I don't want to just be a bystander to rain, passive and protected; I want to be part of the downpour, to be soaked, along with the dark humus that squishes underfoot."

"When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are. So I stretch out, close my eyes, and listen to the rain."

"And we think of it as simply time, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story."

"Is is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave."

"Human beings made this happen, not a faceless corporation. There were no threats, no extenuating circumstances to force their hands, just business as usual. And the people of the city allowed it to happen."

"The breath of plant gives life to animals and the breath of animals gives life to plants. My breath is your breath, your breath is mine."

"But standing on the roadside, you can hear the pop of the body, hear the moment when a glistening being following magnetic trails toward love is reduced to red pulp on the pavement."

"I fear that a world made of gifts cannot coexist with a world made of commodities. I fear that I have no power to protect what I love against the Windigo."

"Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world's wealthiest peoples. The shortage is due not to how much material wealth there actually is, but to the way in which it is exchanged or circulated."

"I believe the answer is contained within our teaching of 'One Bowl and One Spoon,' which holds that the gifts of the earth are all in one bowl, all to be shared from a single spoon."

"Each of us comes from people who were once indigenous. We can reclaim our membership in the cultures of gratitude that formed our relationships with the living earth."

"A gift is different from something you buy, possessed of meaning outside its material boundaries. You never dishonor the gift. A gift asks something of you. To take care of it. And something more."

[quotes] When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi 2016

 

[this book made me think to powerfully about what I value in life]

"If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?"

"Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action."

"Would you trade your ability - or your mother's - to talk for a few extra months of mute life? The expansion of your visual blind spot the exchange for eliminating the small possibility of a fatal brain hemorrhage? Your right hand's function to stop seizures? How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable? Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?"

"When a patient comes in with a fatal head bleed, that first conversation with a neurosurgeon may forever color how the family remembers the death, from a peaceful letting go ("Maybe it was his time") to an open sore of regret ("Those doctors didn't listen! They didn't even try to save him!"). When there's no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon's only tool.

"The call to protect life - and not merely life but another's identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another's soul - was obvious in its sacredness."

"Before operating on a patient's brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end."

"While most scientists connived to publish in the most prestigious journals and get their names out there, V maintained that our only obligation was to be authentic to the scientific story and to tell it uncompromisingly. I'd never met someone so successful who was also committed to goodness. V was an actual paragon."

"You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving."

"Yes, I thought, and therein was the paradox: like a runner crossing the finish line only to collapse, without that duty to care for the ill pushing me forward, I became an invalid."

"I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when."

"If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?"

"'Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?' 'Wouldn't it be great if it did?' I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering."

"Because I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that event if I'm dying, until I actually die, I am still living."

"Moral duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back into the operating room."

"The way forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I'd spend time with family. Tell me one year, I'd write a book. Give me ten years, I'd get back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn't help: What was I supposed to do with that day?"

"the physician's duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence."

"Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue."

"In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete."

"Suddenly, all of my joys were salted. For breakfast, Lucy made me a bagel with cream cheese; it tasted like a salt lick. I set it aside. Reading was exhausting."

"During lucid moments, I was acutely aware that with this many voices, cacophony results. In medicine, this is known as the WICOS problem: Who Is the Captain Of this Ship? The nephrologist disagreed with the ICU doctors, who disagreed with the endocrinologists, who disagreed with the oncologists, who disagreed with the gastroenterologists."

"There we were, doctor and patient, in a relationship that sometimes carries a magisterial air and other times, like now, was no more, and no less, than two people huddled together, as one faces the abyss."

"Part of the cruelty of cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time; it also limits your energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into a day."

"Graham Greene once said that life was lived in the first twenty years and the remainder was just reflection. So what tense am I living in now?"

"Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past."

"There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past."

"... you have filled a dying man's days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing."

"We each joked to close friends that the secret to saving a relationship is for one person to become terminally ill. Conversely, we knew that one trick to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love - to be vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful."

"That Paul and I formed part of the deep meaning of each other's lives is one of the greatest blessings that has ever come to me."

"He let himself be open and vulnerable, let himself be comforted."

"Not fully captured in these pages are Paul's sense of humor - he was wickedly funny - or his sweetness and tenderness, the value he placed on relationships with friends and family. But this is the book he wrote; this was his voice during this time; this was his message during this time; this was what he wrote when he needed to write it."

"For much of his life, Paul wondered about death - and whether he could face it with integrity. in the end, the answer was yes. I was his wife and a witness."

[quotes] Yolk - Mary H. K. Choi 2021

 

[never read a book recommendation faster than this one.] 

"Depending on where I focus and how much pressure I apply to the back of my throat, I can just about blot him out."

"This place commands total dedication or it will eject you. I really would rather die than go home."

"Part of me is proud that she gets to have all this - knowing that we come from the same place and that she's earned it. Another part of me wonders if she's secretly Republican."

"I imagine the woman on the train, clutching the subway pole because no one will give up their seat for her. I want to fight them all."

"I can't wait to get out of these fucking jeans. All I want to do is peel off this costume, step into the shower, eat the world, and go to bed."

"Turns out Jeremy is an only child. An only child who carries nothing because the kindness of strangers never fails him."

"Design school in Manhattan is Hunger Games for East Asian kids with severe haircuts. I can't tell if I'm the racist one for feeling like we're interchangeable, but all the incentives seem scammy to me."

"I don't respond, seething. Instead I check Tinder. I swipe and swipe and swipe and swipe. It's dazzling how disposable we all are."

"I hang my coat, marveling at the superabundant closet space. A life beyond breaking shitty plastic hangers every time you shove excess clothing inside."

"I want her to tell me the day, the hour, and the exact minute when she'll die. And I want her to go away so I can start preparing for it now with zero new memories because I have enough that I'll miss."

"Even in Texas, where we moved later that year. Enormous, ridiculous Texas. Where everything was so flat you could feel all hundred and eighty degrees of sky at your shoulders."

"Sorting scary, unfathomable variables like infant mortality rates by relating them to economics makes us feel safer. That if we can predict it or draw a little line, we'll be protected from them, at the very least, feeling stupid."

"It's why randomness is unacceptable. Why organized religion is a salve. It's far more palatable to think of a divine order. Why conspiracies are easier to stomach over psychopaths making a rash decision that alters the course of history."

"I'm too scared to talk about it, but sometimes I worry that I don't exist. That I don't count."

"All I could think was how I didn't want a friend who was anything like me. I have enough of me to go around."

"All the sex I've ever had seemed inevitable. It wasn't wrought but ordained. It was like watching someone fall from a height. We all know where it's going."

"Secrets are like wishes. Everyone knows they don't work if you tell. But if you really want them to gain power, you can't acknowledge that they even exist."

"I keep going, putting my mouth where people shit and abasing myself the way I always do, trying to exorcise the hate and anger and never managing to get it all out."

"I'm crying. And watching myself cry only amplifies my sadness. I'm filled with devastating pity for every single mirror version of me, all those times before, the youngest ones making me saddest of all. Watching myself have compassion for me in the absence of anyone else makes me cry harder."

"Humans need to share their darkest parts. Unburdening makes you closer to everyone."

"I thought a polished appearance and stellar behavior would be the passport to belonging. And when I inevitably failed at perfection, I could at least willfully do everything in my power to be kicked out before anyone left me."

[quotes] Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata 2016

 

"Overwhelmed by a sensation of having stumbled into another dimension, I walked quickly through it looking for a metro station."

"And I probably infect others with the way I speak too. Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think."

"When something was strange, everyone thought they had the right to come stomping all over your life to figure out why."

"A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment where foreign matter is immediately eliminated."

"When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face when they do this to me. And as I do so I always think: that's what a human is."

"From where I stood, there were two types of prejudiced people - those who had a deep-rooted urge for prejudice and those who unthinkingly repeated a barrage of slurs they'd heard somewhere. Shiraha appeared to be the latter."

"The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of."

"The manager often says 'someone we can use,' and I wonder whether I'm someone we can use or not. Maybe I'm working because I want to be useful too."

"'I read history books trying to find out when society went so wrong. But however far back I went, a hundred years, two hundred years, a thousand years, it was always wrong.'"

"Maybe people who thought they were being violated felt a bit better when they attacked other people in the same way."

"You eliminate the parts of your life that others find strange - maybe that's what everyone means when they say they want to 'cure' me."

"You either get married and have kids or go hunting and earn money, and anyone who doesn't contribute to the village in one of these forms is a heretic."

[quotes] The Woman Warrior - Maxine Hong Kingston 1975

 

[found this book randomly at a lending library. so beautiful.] 

"Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?"

"I want her fear to have lasted just as long as rape lasted so that the fear could have been contained. No drawn-out fear. But women at sex hazarded birth and hence lifetimes. The fear did not stop but permeated everywhere. She told the man, 'I think I'm pregnant.' He organized the raid against her."

"I inspired my army, and I fed them. At night I sang to them glorious songs that came out of the sky and into my head. When I opened my mouth, the songs poured out and were loud enough for the whole encampment to hear; my army stretched out for a mile."

"At my great-uncle's funeral I secretly tested out feeling glad that he was dead - the six-foot bearish masculinity of him."

"I went away to college - Berkeley in the sixties - and I studied, and I marched to change the world, but I did not turn into a boy. I would have liked to bring myself back as a boy for my parents to welcome with chickens and pigs. That was for my brother, who returned alive from Vietnam."

"If I took the sword, which my hate must surely have forged out of the air, and gutted him, I would put color and wrinkles into his shirt."

"When I dream that I am wire without flesh, there is a letter on blue airmail paper that floats above the night ocean between here and China. It must arrive safely or else my grandmother and I will lose each other."

"Perhaps human beings just die, and that's the end. I don't think I'd mind that too much. Which would you rather be? A ghost who is constantly wanting to be fed? Or nothing?"

"Nor did she change her name: Brave Orchid. Professional women have the right to use their maiden names if they like. Even when she emigrated, my mother kept Brave Orchid, adding no American name nor holding one in reserve for American emergencies."

"To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which as in Chinese, the language of impossible stories. Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-packed with homemade underwear."

"As a child I feared the size of the world. The farther away the sound of howling dogs, the farther away the sound of the trains, the tighter I curled myself under the quilt. The trains sounded deeper and deeper into the night. They had not reached the end of the world before I stopped hearing them, the last long moan diminishing toward China. How large the world must be to make my grandmother only a taste by the time she reaches me."

"'We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.'"

"My throat cut off the word - silence in front of the most understanding teacher. There were secrets never to be said in front of the ghosts, immigration secrets whose telling could get us sent back to China."

"I'd like to go to New Society Village someday and find out exactly how far I can walk before people stop talking like me. I continue to sort out what's just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living."

[quotes] Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life - Emily Nagoski, Ph.D. 2015

 

"In the right context, sexual behavior is arguably the most pleasurable experience a human can have."

"Completing the cycle requires that, instead of hitting the brake on our stress, we gently remove our food from both the accelerator and the brake and allow ourselves to coast to a stop. To do that, you create the right context and trust your body to do its thing."

"Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state."

"If you change only one thing in your life as a result of reading this book, make it this daily two-minute practice. The practice grants the opportunity to 'cultivate deep respect for emotions,' differentiating their causes from their effects and granting you choice over how you manage them."

"Love, according to the parable, is the pursuit of our own wholeness. We wander the earth in search of our lost half."

"As infants, our lives literally depends on our adult caregivers coming when we need them. As adults, that's no longer true, but our bodies don't know it. Our bodies are pretty sure that if our attachment object doesn't come back, we'll die."

"In practice, humans build important social connections with multiple people, and our sense of wholeness emerges both from our own inner sense of wholeness and from our connection with our friends and family, as well as with our partner."

"Secure attachers have more positive emotions during sex, more frequent sex, higher levels of arousal and orgasm, and better communication about sex."

"People with anxious attachment styles are the most likely to engage in anxiety-driven 'solace sex' - that is, using sex as an attachment behavior - which can make sex intense without making it pleasurable."

"People with avoidant attachment start having sex later in life, have sex less often, with fewer noncoital behaviors. They have more positive attitudes toward sex outside committed relationships, have more one-night stands, and are more likely to have sex just to fit into a social expectation rather than because they really want to."

"Each of you is 100 percent responsible for your own feelings."

"Sex is an attachment behavior. When your attachment is threatened or when you and your partner share a stressor, sex can be a powerful, pleasurable way to connect in the face of the 'I'm lost' signals, so that you can find your way home."

"Also: You're too fat and too thin; your breasts are too big and too small. Your body is wrong. If you're not trying to change it, you're lazy. If you're satisfied with yourself as you are, you're settling. And if you dare to actively like yourself, you're a conceited bitch. In short, you are doing it wrong. Do it differently. No, that's wrong too, try something else. Forever."

"Women have cultural permission to criticize ourselves, but we are punished if we praise ourselves, if we dare to say that we like ourselves the way we are."

"In the Judeo-Christian ethic, bodies are low and spirit is high, animal instincts are low and human reason is high, and very often human reason is high, and very often women are low and men are high. Sex draws attention downward to the base, the animal, the contemptible, and it therefore triggers the disgust response."

"No matter what was planted in your garden, no matter how you've been tending it, you are the gardener. You didn't get to choose your little plot of land - your SIS and SES and your body - and you didn't get to choose your family or your culture, but you do get to choose every single other thing."

"Genital response doesn't always match experience, so buy some lube?"

"What this research suggests is that a woman's emotional experience is more likely to line up with her facial expression and her vocal inflection."

"But women aren't broken versions of men; they're women."

"Women are not liars, in denial, or otherwise broken. They are women, rather than men."

"Desire is arousal in context. And then we'll talk about what desire is not - it's not a drive, not a 'hunger' - and why that matters so much. Which will bring us to the surprising truth about what desire is: It's curiosity."

"But I do know that men's sexual entitlement is a primary reason they sexually assault women. It seems to me that if you believe your erection means you have a 'basic survival need,' then the sex-as-drive myth - combined with long-standing cultural attitudes that women aren't allowed the same sexual agency as men - turns toxic, fast."

"The little monitor and her opinions about how effortful things should be is the foundation of a wide range of frustrations and satisfactions, sexual desire not least among them."

"And curiosity, like sex, is deprioritized when you're stressed. If you're anxious or depressed, you are less curious about novelty and are more interested in being in a comfortable, familiar environment."

"We want love, which is about security and safety and stability, but we also want passion, which is about adventure and risk and novelty. Love is having. Desire is wanting. And you can want only what you don't already have."

"Don't just decide to have sex, try on this identity of a woman who loves sex."

"Put simply, the best way to deal with differential desire is: Be kind to each other."

"When you welcome someone new into your garden, remember, that person is used to working in their own garden, and that garden is different from yours."

"And what a men-as-default, puritanical culture expects, wants, and likes is pleasure for men and babies for women."

"But all you need to remember is that peak sexual pleasure happens when the whole collective works together, when all the birds are flying in the same direction, when all of your motivation systems are coordinated and attuned to the environment in a way that gives rise to every system moving collectively toward orgasm."

"The most pleasurable orgasms happen when every part of you is present and collaborating in pursuit of one shared goal: ecstasy."

"Pleasure is an emergent property of the interaction of multiple systems - it's a process, not a state, an interaction, not a specific area of the brain or the body. Pleasure is the whole flock. Pleasure is all of you."

"Feeling okay about how you feel - even when it's not what you expected - is the key to extraordinary sex."

"'Don't chase, don't push or pull. Be like the person with the broom on a curling team. Clear the path to sex.'"

"What these two rules mean is that your best source of knowledge about your sexuality is your own internal experience. When you notice disagreement between the terrain and the map - and everyone does, at some point - always assume your body is right. And assume everyone's body is different from yours - as are everyone's maps."

"In other words, nonjudging allows you to feel what you feel, whether or not it makes sense to you, whether or not it's comfortable, whether or not it's what you believe you should be feeling. Nonjudging is neutrally noticing your own internal states."

"In other words, emotion coaching teaches you that feelings are tunnels, and you can allow yourself to go through the darkness to get to the light."

"You belong in your body. You belong in the world. You've belonged since the day you were born, this is your home. You don't have to earn it by conforming to some externally imposed sexual standard."

"It's not how you feel. It's how you feel about how you feel."

"I wrote this book to teach women to live with confidence and joy. If you remember even one of the ideas in this book - no two alike, brakes and accelerator, context, nonconcordant arousal, responsive desire, any of them - and use it to improve your relationship with your own sexuality, you'll be helping me with that goal."

"Practicing ecstasy is practicing living outside all of those things, learning how to release them. It's as good for you as vegetables, jogging, sleep, and breathing."

[quotes] Imago - Octavia Butler 1989

 

"Humans said one thing with their bodies and another with their mouths and everyone had to spend time and energy figuring out what they really meant. And once we did understand them, the Humans got angry and acted as though we had stolen thoughts from their minds."

[quotes] When They Call You a Terrorist - Asha Bandele, Patrisse Cullors 2018

  

"This neighborhood, this world, is all I have known, it's what I have loved, despite the hardship I don't really know as hardship because it's how everyone lives."

"And for me, too, it started the year I turned twelve. That was the year that I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready."

"We only know that crack filled the empty spaces for a lot of people whose lives have been emptied out."

"Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state."

"Stock in private prisons and companies attached to prisons represents the largest growth industry in the American market as the millennium lurches toward its barbed-wire close."

"In almost every way, Mandela speaking in 1964 at the trial at Rivonia could have been one of our leaders speaking for Los Angeles in 1992, the year of the uprising."

"If we did not die, we could go to prison, where we could work for the State of California and corporate brands we could not afford to buy."

"But so ineffective were these laws [gang statutes] that between 1990 and 2010 in my city, Los Angeles, with the greatest number of injunctions in the state designed, they said, to stop gang activity, 10,000 young people were killed.

"Donna Hill, a simple, single Black woman with a heart that could carry a universe, becomes my first spirit guide, the first and most clear example I have as a young adult of what it means to receive a gift you can only properly show gratitude for by sharing it with others."

"I talk about the politics of personal responsibility, how it's mostly a lie meant to keep you from challenging real-world legislative decisions that chart people's paths, that undo people's lives."

"But now that race isn't written into the law, she says, look for the codes. Look for the coded language everywhere, she says. They rewrote the laws, but they didn't rewrite white supremacy. They kept that shit intact, she says."

"He loves me as is, which is a gift I wish for all of us to receive, the gift of being loved simply because of who you are, not in spite of it, not with condition, not loved in parts."

"How do you measure the loss of what a human being does not receive?"

"In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn't mean you're not doing life."

"How is it possible that the only response we have for poor people who are mentally ill is criminalization? How does this align with the notion of a democratic or free society - to not take care of the least of these?"

"From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing."

"I do know that in my heart, the heart dedicated to Black liberation, I love people. Period. I love complicated, imperfect, beautiful people. People, I suppose, like me."

"We want to build a world in which undeveloped and unrefined emotional instincts - like possessiveness and jealousy - are minimized as much as humanly possible so that all eyes, hearts and spirits are not distracted from the goal. And the goal is freedom. The goal is to live beyond fear. The goal is to end the occupation of our bodies and souls by the agents of a larger American culture that demonstrates daily how we don't matter."

"Asset forfeiture allowed law enforcement to seize property simply if they said that they suspected someone of being involved with the drug trade."

"It's hard to be intimate with one person when you're being intimate with the world."

"We think about ways we could co-parent and partner without being married. I like how I feel in the space with JT, both liberated and connected."

"One by one each of us finds a chair - this is why I am barefoot, why we came in barefoot. And one by one almost all of us begin to speak: 
If I die in police custody, know that they killed me.
If I die in police custody, show up at the jail, make noise, protest, tell my mother.
If I die in police custody, tell the entire world: I wanted to live."

"You have the power to shape-shift not only yourselves but the world of the world. You, each one, are endowed with gifts you don't even yet know, and you, each one, are what love and the possibility of a world in which our lives truly matter looks like."

[quotes] The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void - Jackie Wang 2021

 

"By making myself visible I remove the anxiety of being found." - Death as a Survival Technique

"I think, How sad that people are not alive to experience their funerals because it's the most love they'll ever get." - Death as a Survival Technique

"In the end I am no longer able to believe that anyone is 'good', though sometimes people are 'correct.'" - Wounded Adjucation

"It is unclear to me if the flock of people and I are migrating away from the catastrophe or toward a party." - Panic at the Disco

"Though sometimes it takes someone's absence to realize what they mean to you. (This is how the dead get revenge from the grave.)" - Dead Letter Day

"I don't understand what has changed but I know I will never be able to touch you again." - How the Egg Loses Its Shape

"There is a hotel room and before entering I say, 'We have to shed our connection to the world.' At the threshold we leave our phones, computers - everything that binds us to the world so that inside the room it will be... just us." - How to Shed the World 

"That comforts me, to know that what happened will always have happened, that the event is immiscible." - The Death of Thurston Moore