archive

"And anyway, what sense does it make at the age of eighty to speak of death without speaking of everything you have lived? It would be like visiting your hometown without setting foot in your house."

"And then love, the great survivor of all disaster."

"When our legs stop working and our eyes stop seeing and our ears stop hearing, we will walk through our memories and they will be clear, and forgotten voices will recount everything once more."

"But she suspects that death begins long before we fall ill, with neither suffering, nor drama, nor a single memorable occurrence."

"But what is frightening is not the thought of the unknown: it is the thought that there may not be an unknown, only an end."

"The dead and rotting, I realized, were still a part of the living. And so, I started to grow around my dead, too."

"I forget that to rot is a natural process, too."

"(...) the girl collector processes cultural history as a living archive, a chaotic collection of artifacts and objects that are often pushed far to the margins of cultural canons."

"Girls' rooms are not meant to last. We grow up. We move out. We leave girlhood behind—or maybe, we never really had it in the first place. They are ephemeral. So why do we never forget the stuff we kept there?"

"Girls' bedrooms (...) are conduits of this "strange magic": an intimacy that transfigures the bedroom into an impermanent, ephemeral archive of girls discovering, consuming, collecting, and curating pop culture."

"Saving the girl stories always start here: at the premise that girlhood is a time of great potential, but that the girl in question cannot actualize her potential or properly access its benefits."

"Bedroom culture itself is as ephemeral as my own teenage bedroom, which doesn't even exist in pictures anymore but is still a place in my mind where I used to read books and comics and sometimes went on the Internet and made mixtapes and collages and wrote in a diary and wrestled with how much I hated myself and wished I wasn't so lonely. A piece of me will always be back there, I think. Chances are a piece of you is always in your teenage bedroom, too."

"As advertisers learned that female empowerment could sell just as well as sex, the most intimate parts of girls' lives—their experiences with sex and sexuality, gender, depression and anxiety, reproductive rights, and much more—was all on the table, commodified for the consumption of a mass audience."

"Girls' rooms appear over and over in girl zines from this era as a utopian space, one that serves as a site of connection, collaboration, creation, and careful collection and curation."

"(...) that strange place between their teenage years and adulthood."

"(...) even if every girl doesn't have a bedroom, the fantasy of a room of their own is still there."

"There's no fear when I'm in my room / it's so clear and I know just what I want to do."