you all have a little bit of ‘I want to save the world’ in you, that’s why you’re here, in college. I want you to know that it’s okay if you only save one person, and it’s okay if that person is you
— tiavision@tumblr’s anthro professor
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a person’s own room is a world in itself. thoughts, ideas, concepts, reflections, and suchlike all take shape in such peculiar, morbid, unique ways. sometimes they fester, other times blossom, or are covered like wood; shaped like wet dark clay in your hands as you struggle to form what you couldn’t—can’t—put in words. everything is simultaneously so sentimental, so mundane, so gratifying, so crude. you reminisce on the memories you’ve created here, the decorations that are positioned in that spot of the room or taped on that angle on the wall placed up to express the small cornerstones of the persona you’ve built up to in your lifetime. maybe there’s a miniscule crack in the wall; a lean in the tie-backs that hold up the curtains and that’s ok. it’s all you in the end, anyway.
— thoughts from inside my room, m.s.
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Fairy tales are more than moral lessons and time capsules for cultural commentary; they are natural law. The child raised on folklore will quickly learn the rules of crossroads and lakes, mirrors and mushroom rings. They’ll never eat or drink of a strange harvest or insult an old woman or fritter away their name as though there’s no power in it. They’ll never underestimate the youngest son or touch anyone’s hairpin or rosebush or bed without asking, and their steps through the woods will be light and unpresumptuous. Little ones who seek out fairy tales are taught to be shrewd and courteous citizens of the seen world, just in case the unseen one ever bleeds over.
— S.T. Gibson
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You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it within himself.
— Galileo Galilei
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While many people think fanfiction is about inserting sex into texts (like Tolkien’s) where it doesn’t belong, Brancher sees it differently: “I was desperate to read about sex that included great friendship; I was repurposing Tolkien’s text in order to do that. It wasn’t that friendship needed to be sexualized, it was that erotica needed to be … friendship-ized.” Many fanfiction writers write about sex in conjunction with beloved texts and characters not because they think those texts are incomplete, but because they’re looking for stories where sex is profound and meaningful. This is part of what makes fan fiction different from pornography: unlike pornography, fanfic features characters we already care deeply about, and who tend to already have long-standing and complex relationships with each other. It’s a genre of sexual subjectification: the very opposite of objectification. It’s benefits with friendship.
— Francesca Coppa, “Introduction to The Dwarf’s Tale,” The Fanfiction Reader
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I wish that future novelists would reject the pressure to write for the betterment of society. Art is not media. A novel is not an “afternoon special” or fodder for the Twittersphere or material for journalists to make neat generalizations about culture. A novel is not Buzzfeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood. Let’s get clear about that. A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness. We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason. Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitative industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves?
— Ottessa Moshfegh