when people are like “oh so you’re just gonna judge someone for their political beliefs?” yes actually. I think someone’s values and opinions is a pretty reasonable thing to judge them for.

Fleabag (2019) // Derry Girls (2019)

sibling relationships are like. im trying so hard. look at me the same way you did so 12 years ago that summer when everything was okay. i miss you (im right here). is this tragedy? i knew you once

gentle reminder you can rise up from everything. you can recreate yourself. nothing is permanent. you are not stuck. you have choices. you can think new thoughts. you can learn something new. you can create new habits. all that matters is that you decide today and never look back.

Seraphine Saintclair, “Comet Taloned Universe”

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018), dir. Arwen Curry

The next line of her speech is also great: “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long — my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

Thank you.

the most disturbing thing isn’t dude bros voting for trump. the most disturbing thing is women, trans, queer, disabled people and people of color voting for trump. it’s disheartening seeing how many women, trans, queer, disabled people and people of color turn out to be trump supporters.

sorry but that man isn’t going to protect you when he’s president. you are betraying your own communities who are trying to protect you at best, voted your own rights away at worst. and for what?

— Evelyn Graham Frost, ‘Memory’

Countdown to Wolf Hall: the mirror and the light | 📅 5th Nov 2024 a gifset per day (2/6) — Episode two 'Entirely Beloved' air date: 28 January 2015

Dutch resistance members celebrate at the moment they heard of Adolf Hitler’s death over the radio, May 1945

modern dating is embarrassing i want to meet someone the old fashioned way (he’s the local hot priest who will question god because of me)

margaret atwood / louise glück

PEDRO PASCAL and PAUL MESCAL for Entertainment Weekly