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“Your mother died out of loneliness,” Granny would always repeat, claiming it was because she had never remarried after my father. But I think it was despair that killed her. Having done only things she didn’t believe in, she must have been dead inside for years before her body finally gave up too.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“Life exists because there’s death, and joy because there’s sorrow.”
― Geetanjali Shree, Tomb of Sand

“The goat convulses in my arms, and Dorothy starts laughing. Then she puts her arm up and juts her chin out, like she’s about to start doing the Dance of the Cuckolded Woodland Sprite, and I start laughing. She’s laughing, and I’m laughing, and I swear to Gods I’m the luckiest man in the world. I look at her, lit by fire, caked in blood, scored by the Shrieking of the Chorus and the wailing of a dying goat, and I wish I could marry her again. I wish I could marry her a hundred thousand times.”
― Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

“Man was considered until the 20th century to include women by implication. They were referring primarily to males. It is now frequently understood to exclude women. This had real consequences. They are endless, but a few come to mind. Heart attacks were described by how they affected men, so that women's symptoms were less likely to be recognized and treated. A situation from which many women died. Crash test dummies replicated male bodies, meaning that vehicular safety design favored male survival and women died at higher rates. The Stanford Prison experiment of 1971 presumed that the behavior of young men at an elite university could be universalized to stand for that of all humanity.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir