The Gothic as a literary aesthetic is completely entwined with the sins of colonialism and the unwelcome and uncanny ways they manifested themselves in Europe. The chaotic forces in the Brontës’ haunted-house stories are albatrosses of the colonial world, like the Caribbean madwoman Bertha Rochester and the dark changeling Heathcliff, whom other characters surmise could be Indian or American.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s just, I’ve spent my whole life not saying anything to anyone, barely to myself in my own head, and now you want me to say it all out loud, and I can’t.”
Note to self, never, ever jump into a gunship with a bot pilot and fight off a construct Attacker code again. You almost deleted yourself, Murderbot.
We were sisters, at last, because we had decided we should be.
My mother was happy in a way I never knew I could make her, and this made me love her with an openhearted abandon I had not experienced since childhood.
And I was so tired of being afraid all the time. It felt like I had been afraid and afraid without stopping forever. I did not even know how afraid I had been
They are dead. I am alive. What I feel standing on the grass of their grave isn’t release, not exactly. It’s grief, but not a bad kind.
When I drink anything out of a martini glass I feel untouched by professional and sexual rejection.
He…told me of the sad discovery he had made when he was 40, namely, that ‘pleasure doesn’t really make one happy,’
Everyone loved San Francisco, but Jones couldn’t suppress his fears that it would soon disappear in a mushroom cloud.
How many times would I have to learn? Every moment of my peace was a lie, for it came only at the gods’ pleasure. No matter what I did, how long I lived, at a whim they would be able to reach down and do with me what they wished.
All institutions require our collective faith in them for them to work. We call that legitimacy.
“I’m sad. I feel like I’m watching the last perfect justice system in the world destroy itself.”
Izzy had the heart of a radical, but she had the experience of a fourteen-year-old living in the suburban Midwest.
All across the hexarchate were people like his older sister: loyal citizens, decent people in their day to day lives, many of whom had benefited even from a system that ran on regular ritualized torture.
…so yeah. Lots of escapism, some memoir, a little unflinching political realism. And Michelle McNamara’s extraordinary book, unbearably unfinished, filled with righteous anger, and an instrument, in the end, of justice.
The world is on fire, and everything seems to be about death right now, but some things have dealt with death in a way that makes me feel less terrible.
Nights are endless because you wake at the softest cough or sob, then lie awake listening to her breathe so softly, like a child. – A Manual for Cleaning Women
This book encouraged me to go back to the stories I’ve already told that still haunt me.
I took the kids to see an all-woman production of Jesus Christ Superstar. It was fabulous, all Resistance and bisexual lighting. Jesus was so good she almost upstaged Judas. Between my parents loving the Sydney production and the Spiral Oasis staging at Burning Man in 99, I have such an odd relationship with this play. It’s puzzling that Lloyd Webber could have written this one decent thing, in a career otherwise so very full of crap. Maybe Judas is his Mary Sue, as Doctor Horrible is Whedon’s.
He rubs his fingers over old scars. – I’ll Be Gone in the Dark
Michelle McNamara and death fought one another to a draw.
Against its nature, the terrified prey animal is turned into an incarnation of terror which drives the predator, man, to flee
The horse was born not in Troy, but in Alexandria: it is a phantom of the library
The connections forged between humans and horses nowadays are relationships based on love, communities of interest and sporting camaraderie.
the native language of equine history is Arabic.
Nobody would have noticed the waif-like boy who hung around the Paris horse market for days on end, in 1851 and the following year. Confident that he was unobserved, he scribbled away on the notepad he took everywhere with him, like a painter on his travels. Nobody recognized him as a young woman dressed as a man, pursuing her ambitious plan.
girls and horses are islands in the flowing river of time.
Somewhat like a precursor to cybernetics, only more direct: a neuro-navigation between interrelated natures. Two moving, loosely coupled systems, circumnavigating the lengthy route of thought, exchanging information directly via the short cut of touching nerves and tendons, thermal and metabolic systems. The act of riding means that command data is transferred in the form of physical data, in a direct exchange of sensory messages. Riding is the connection of two warm, breathing, pulsating bodies, mediated only by a saddle, a blanket or mere bare skin. Humans enter into similar informational connections when they dance together, wrestle or embrace.
It was one of Kami’s earliest memories, the look of fear on her mother’s face as she watched Kami. “I’ve been scared all my life,” Kami said slowly. “I’ve thought I might be crazy all my life, and you did it to me.”
preoccupations