I’m putting this up on Friday, so I might be still asleep this morning (Saturday), but here’s another round of quotes that I particularly liked.
“Despite what you may believe, you can disappoint people and still be good enough. You can make mistakes and still be capable and talented. You can let people down and still be worthwhile and deserving of love. Everyone has disappointed someone they care about. Everyone messes up, lets people down, and makes mistakes. Not because we’re inadequate or fundamentally inept, but because we’re imperfect and fundamentally human. Expecting anything different is setting yourself up for failure.” -Daniell Koepke
“A woman can hide her love for forty years, but she cannot hide her hatred for more than an hour.” -Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib-عليه السلام
“Dreaming is not only an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind’s deepest needs.” -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being
“With the upcoming fourth season of A Game of Thrones about to hit TV screens, you will soon see ‘If you like reading GRR Martin, why not try these authors?’ displays going up in bookshops. I will give a book of mine, of their choice, to the first person who can send me a photo of such a display that isn’t entirely composed of male authors. Because I’ve yet to see one. I have challenged staff in bookshops about this, to be told ‘women don’t write epic fantasy’ Ahem, with 15 novels published, I beg to differ. And we read it too.
“But that’s not what the onlooker sees in the media, in reviews, in the supposedly book-trade-professional articles in The Guardian which repeatedly discuss epic fantasy without ever once mentioning a female author. That onlooker who’s working in a bookshop and making key decisions about what’s for sale, sees a male readership for grimdark books about blokes in cloaks written by authors like Macho McHackenslay. So that’s what goes in display, often at discount, at the front of the store. So that’s what people see first and so that’s what sells most copies.” –Juliet E. McKenna being brilliant (so what else is new) on the SFWA shoutback, public perceptions of the field, and equal access to offensiveness, sexism and idiocy.
“My GPA shouldn’t have to suffer for “diversity” in literature.” -White woman in my class, who had difficulty reading literature by people of color because of their “uneducated sounding writing” and “difficult to relate to life experiences” (via sinidentidades)
“Ellen Page said she’d been scared to reveal her truth, and in response way too many people responded with, ”In other news, the sky is blue.” The fact that so many felt comfortable being that rude to someone who’d just publicly shared a private struggle speaks volumes about how important they consider the issues of gay women to be. We should be wary of these people. People like them are why so many believe this country is post-racial or post-feminist when this country is racist as fuck and hates women.” -From A Tale Of Two Ellens | Autostraddle
“If you point out casual racism on a regular basis, you’re going to get a lot of people whining that you’re too ‘politically correct,’ which is not a phrase that actually means anything anymore, besides saying of its speaker, ‘I am nostalgic for a time when I could be as racist as I wanted and nobody bugged me about it and thus I would like you to just shut up now you dumb person with your stupid thinky brain thoughts trying to infiltrate the hostile and unmovable lump of granite I replaced my mind with.’” –Casual Racism is Not My Spirit Animal
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