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If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the love of nature" seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.

“I would claim the lessening of effort as essential to the phenomenon of privilege. If less effort is required to unlock the door for the key that fits the lock, so too less effort is required to pass through an institution for bodies that fit. Social privilege is like an energy-saving device: less effort is required to pass through. No wonder that not to inherit privilege can be so ‘trying.’ Not to fit, or to fail to inhabit a norm, can often mean being charged with willfulness, whatever you say or do…Not only do you have to become insistent in order to receive what was automatically given to the others; but your insistence confirms the improper nature of your residence. We do not tend to notice the assistance given to those whose residence is assumed. Insistence is a form of political labor, given that it is unevenly distributed as a requirement. Insistence can thus be understood as a political grammar. For example, to be transgender can be to experience the labor of having to insist on what is automatically given to the others: having to insist on being ‘he’ or’ she’ or ‘not he’ or ‘not she’ when you are assigned the wrong pronoun; having to keep insisting, where the necessity of repetition gets in the way of the hope of things just receding. Sometimes you might have to insist on not being gendered by pronouns at all: willfulness can be the refusal to be housed by gender. And to be in a same-sex relationship is to experience the gendered pronoun as a sign of struggle, one that is both personal as well as political: when your partner is assumed to be 'he’ or 'she’ you have to correct the assumption, and the very act of correction can be heard as a willful imposition on others. It is exhausting, this labor, which is required because certain norms are still at work in how people are assumed to be and to gather; even if we have rights and recognition, the ongoing and everyday nature of these struggles with signs are signs of a struggle. A desire for a more normal life does not necessarily mean identification with norms, but can be simply this: a desire to escape the exhaustion of having to insist just to exist.”

The only times I ever remember seeing a dentist or doctor as a child was at school. I'm quite healthy physically and I'm very grateful for all the care I got from the various professionals who cared about my well-being and development more than my actual parents did.

Some parents would not take care of their children even if they were given all the time and the resources. Mine are a great example of that — my mother stopped working and became a homemaker when I was in kindergarten, my father worked from the garage and was also always home. They had a car and our village even had a bus that would come once or twice an hour that would take you to the next two bigger cities.

A knee-jerk response to neglectful parenting I see a lot is “people should have to get licenses and take rigorous tests to PROVE that they should be ALLOWED to have kids” which is eugenics. That’s just the starting line for eugenics.

there isn’t a single living organism i don’t like, don’t think is cute, or don’t love and appreciate.

Me: Fuck, the paper towels I want are on the top shelf.