Hannah Gadsby

finished her note by imploring me not to be sad about not being able to come home, reminding me that she had regrets too. “But it’s all part of the soup. Too late to take the onions out now.”

I am terrified of teenagers. Which I don’t find problematic. I like to think that anybody who was even a little bit bullied at school will always carry a healthy fear of school-aged children.

We know that there is a strong correlation between low literacy levels and homophobia. But instead of investing in education, leaders were investing in hate, again.

To actively isolate a fellow human being is nothing short of structural violence

Writing has always been a challenging process for me

I think he hit me because he saw me as being incorrectly female. I think he hit me because he saw me as a threat to his masculinity. But most of all, I think he hit me because he saw it as his job, as a man, to enforce the rules as he understood them. And at the time, I could only agree with him because I had been raised in the same school of toxic masculinity.

safety is not something that an individual can summon on their own. Safety is not a gun. Safety is being able to trust that those around you WANT to protect you from harm.

As each idea was loosened and freed from my head cocoon, the pressure inside me would begin to ease off, but then I would see a multitude of possible idea-prisoners and I didn’t know how to choose which one to give shape to. Every time I felt myself panicking about the impossibility of making all the pieces fit, I reminded myself: one idea at a time. And I would set the unfinished idea aside and strike up a conversation with a different one

Western culture is built around the fucked-up and demonstrably false premise that “white men” are the natural peak of the human pyramid. By that measure, history becomes nothing more than a glorified mood diary for white men. But this history of art is not only sexist and racist, it has also totally rewritten the narrative of queer bodies, and by rewritten, I mean erased.

I decided that I did not want to waste any more of my precious energy trying to police what others have to say about my body or even try and change what it is they believe my body says about my worth as a human. I have not changed my mind since then.