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“For me fiction is a way of asking: what if things were other than they are? And a central component of that is to ask: what if I was different than I am? I have always found the practice of writing fiction far more an escape from self than an exploration of it.”

— Zadie Smith, “The I Who Is Not Me”

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Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

Leo Tolstoy

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easily becoming, through an open eye, monstrous and beautiful.

Patti Smith, from Woolgathering

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[O]nce you get beyond the Earth, the lines we’ve drawn between us are impossible to see. Nationalism may have propelled us into space, but when astronauts turned around and photographed the planet from the moon, the picture they captured, “Earthrise,” spurred an environmental movement: a singular, small blue-green ball that we all have to share for better or worse. There’s even a term for a cognitive shift that happens when people go to space: the overview effect, a certain state of awe that can alter the way people fundamentally perceive themselves, their connection to others, and the larger world. Space opera is imbued with this spirit.

Why Compassion Is a Common Theme in Space Opera

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“In writing, even if my distortions and deformations be deliberate, they are not necessarily less near to the truth of things. One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life. The truth is in no way disturbed by the violent perturbations of the spirit.”

— Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart

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A sensuous hunger swirled in my veins. I wanted to drink and eat and lie naked with someone, to burn or break something inside me.

— Hisham Matar, My Friends

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“The hidden content of people’s lives proves a very hard thing to discern: all we really have to go on are these outward, manifest signs, the way people speak, move, dress, treat each other. And that’s what I try to concern myself with in fiction: the way of things in reality, as far as I am able to see and interpret them, which may not be especially far.”

— Zadie Smith, “Notes on NW”

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“Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, Introduction, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

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for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

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My new tiny and totally safe game is coming very soon.

All you need to do is complete a short Evalua†ion.

This should help you with the following:

- Get to know your spirituality

- Get closer to God

- Commune with the dead

- See your future

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"We all run from the ugly. And the farther we run from it, the more we stigmatize it and the more power we give beauty. Our communities are obsessed with being beautiful and gorgeous and hot. What would it mean if we were ugly? What would it mean if we didn’t run from our own ugliness or each other’s? How do we take the sting out of “ugly?” What would it mean to acknowledge our ugliness for all it has given us, how it has shaped our brilliance and taught us about how we never want to make anyone else feel? What would it take for us to be able to risk being ugly, in whatever that means for us. What would happen if we stopped apologizing for our ugly, stopped being ashamed of it? What if we let go of being beautiful, stopped chasing “pretty,” stopped sucking in and shrinking and spending enormous amounts of money and time on things that don’t make us magnificent?

Where is the Ugly in you? What is it trying to teach you?"

- Mia Mingus, "Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability" as quoted in Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da'Shaun L. Harrison

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“So…how do you torture a woman? Well, you can tie her up on the rack and rip her bones apart from the sockets. That’s one way. Or you can tear apart her mind and her body. Now, there’s two ways to do this: You can pry her body away from her mind, or you can pry her mind away from her body. Either way, it works out to the same thing – you stop the woman. She can think but not act, or she can act but not think. To pry her body away from her mind, you need to physically humiliate her. Of course, rape is the most traditional method, but it’s not the only one, by any means. You can ridicule her body, or make fun of the things she does. You can make her self-conscious about her looks. You can make her strap her breasts in. You can make her embarrassed about her periods. You can make her frightened of puberty, frightened of sex, frightened of aging, frightened of eating. You can terrorize her with her own body, and then she will torture herself.”

— ‘The Second Coming of Joan of Arc’ by Carolyn Gage

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"So, let's get the truth here! You don't want to stop eating! You love to eat! You don't want to be thin! You don't want to be beautiful! You don't want people to love you! All you really want is to know that you're all right! That's what can give you peace! "If I had arms and legs and hair like everybody else, do you think I'd be happy? NO! I would not! Because then I'd worry did somebody love me! I'd have to look outside myself to find out what to think of myself! "And you! You aren't ever going to look like a fashion queen! Does that mean you have to be miserable all your life? Does it? "Can you be happy with the movies and the ads and the clothes in the stores and the doctors and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You can't. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them. . . ."

Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn

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Through the creation of ‘‘ugly bodies,’’ marking out the culturally imperialized as ‘‘dirty, defiled, impure, contaminated, or sick,’’ the dominant group exercises its powers of Othering and standardization. The dominant view stands as normal, rational, and objective, and the dominant group can harness science to enforce and reinforce the categories created in cultural imperialism. As the privileged groups lose their peculiarity, assuming the position of a universal, scientific view, the oppressed become ‘‘locked in their objectified bodies’’. While the culturally imperialized are denied the opportunity to define themselves, and are marked as degenerate, flawed, and undesirable, the dominant group is allowed to individuate and takes the position of superiority, bodily and morally.

– Kathryn MacKay, “A Feminist Analysis of Anti-Obesity Campaigns” (2017)

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“I don’t really want to hear everything you’re doing to avoid looking like me.”

— “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People, Aubrey Gordon