All Quotes By Tag: Authenticity

“How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of “authenticity” by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the “authenticity” of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for “authenticity” in such novels almost always ends up being “how much do the women suffer”, instead of – as might also be the case – “how sexist are the heroes”.And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can’t they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of “authenticity” is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.-Comment at Staffer’s Book Review 4/18/2012 to “Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency ”

“In a world full of automated responses be the one who responds personally!”

“It’s what we do behind the scenes that affects the power and anointing we carry out in public.”

“The reality of grief is far different from what others see from the outside. There is pain in this world that you can’t be cheered out of. You don’t need solutions. You don’t need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”

“When you try to take someone’s pain away from them, you don’t make it better. You just tell them it’s not OK to talk about their pain.”

“Every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn’t.”

“Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”

“True comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away. Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.”

“Down with, “Fake it, till you make it.”Up with, “Make it so you don’t have to fake it!”

“Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There’s a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. … How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.”

“Lineage, personality, and environment may shape you, but they do not define your full potential.”

“i was so woried about wat i woud become in the future that i didnt realize i can be anything i want to be right now”

“They all believed in him because of the authenticity of his musical talent and his faith in it.”

“No matter how you define success, you will need to be resilient, empowered, authentic, and limber to get there.”

“As a child, at the age when others promise to be Chateaubriand or nothing, I had written that I would be myself or nothing. I had certainly not foreseen that one day I would find myself in the position of being both myself and nothing. 65”