This one is worth a passage:

...If two parties are engaged in a relatively equal contest of violence - say, generals commanding opposing armies - they have good reason to try to get inside each other's heads. It is only when one side has an overwhelming advantage in their capacity to cause physical harm that they no longer need to do so. But this has very profound effects, because it means that the most characteristic effect of violence, its ability to obviate the need for "interpretive labor," becomes most salient when the violence itself is least visible - in fact, where acts of spectacular physical violence are least likely to occur. These are of course precisely what I have just defined as situations of structural violence, systematic inequalities ultimately backed up by the threat of force. For this reason, situations of structural violence invariably produce extreme lopsided structures of imaginative identification.

These effects are often most visible when the structures of inequality take the most deeply internalized forms. Gender is again a classic case in point. For example, in American situation comedies of the 1950s, there was a constant staple: jokes about the impossibility of understanding women. The jokes (told, of course, by men) always represented women's logic as fundamentally alien and incomprehensible "You have to love them," the message always seemed to run, "but who can really understand how these creatures think?" One never had the impression that the women in question had any trouble understanding men. The reason is obvious. Women had no choice but to understand men. In America, the fifties were the heyday of a certain ideal of the one-income patriarchal family, and among the more affluent, the ideal was often achieved. Women with no access to their own income or resources obviously had no choice but to spend a great deal of time and energy understanding what their menfolk thought was going on.

This kind of rhetoric about the mysteries of womankind appears to be a perennial feature of such patriarchal arrangements. It is usually paired with a sense that, though illogical and inexplicable, women still have access to mysterious, almost mystical wisdom ("women's intuition") unavailable to men. And of course something like this happens in any relation of extreme inequality: peasants, for example, are always represented as being both oafishly simple, but somehow, also, mysteriously wise. Generations of women novelists - Virginia Woolf comes most immediately to mind (To the LIghthouse) - have documented the other side of such arrangements: the constant efforts women end up having to expend in managing, maintaining and adjusting the egos of oblivious and self-important men, involving the continual work of imaginative identification, or interpretive labor. This work carries over on every level. Women everywhere are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence. A popular exercise among high school creative writing teachers in America, for example, is to ask students to imagine they have been transformed, for a day, into someone of the opposite sex, and describe what that day might be like. The results, apparently, are uncannily uniform. The girls all write long and detailed essays that clearly show they have spent a great deal of time thinking about the subject. Usually, a good proportion of the boys refuse to write the essay entirely. Those who do make it clear they have not the slightest conception what being a teenage girl might be like, and are outraged at the suggestion that they should have to think about it.

- David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

There’s nothing on my horizon except everything. Everything is on my horizon.

- Rainn Wilson aka Dwight Schrute.

"The road of life is paved with flat squirrels that couldn’t make a decision.”

- Unknown

“Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well off.”

- Thomas Piketty

"Our patients' lives and identities may be in our hands - yet death will always win. Even if you are perfect, the world isn't. The secret is to know the deck you stack - that you will lose, that your hands or judgement will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can't ever reach perfection - but you can believe in an asymptote towards which you are ceaselessly striving."

- Paul Kalanithi

We can either make our choices deliberately, or let others or other things decide for us.

- Greg McKeown

“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”

-Jack Handey

And I want to play hide-and-seek

and give you my clothes

and tell you I like your shoes

and sit on the steps while you take a bath

and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand

and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food

and meet you at Rudy’s and talk about the day

and type your letters and carry your boxes

and laugh at your paranoia

and give you tapes you don’t listen to

and watch great films and watch terrible films

and complain about the radio

and take pictures of you when you’re sleeping

and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight

and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match

and tell you about the the programme I saw the night before

and take you to the eye hospital

and not laugh at your jokes

and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while

and kiss your back and stroke your skin

and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse your

and sit on the steps smoking till your neighbour comes home

and sit on the steps smoking till you come home

and worry when you’re late

and be amazed when you’re early

and give you sunflowers

and go to your party and dance till I’m black

and be sorry when I’m wrong

and happy when you forgive me

and look at your photos

and wish I’d known you forever

and hear your voice in my ear and feel your skin on my skin

and get scared when you’re angry

and your eye has gone red and the other eye blue

and your hair to the left and your face oriental

and tell you you’re gorgeous and hug you when you’re anxious

and hold you when you hurt

and want you when I smell you

and offend you when I touch you and whimper

when I’m next to you and whimper

when I’m not and dribble on your breast and smother you in the night and get cold

when you take the blanket and hot when you don’t and melt

when you smile and dissolve

when you laugh

and not understand why you think I’m rejecting you when I’m not rejecting you

and wonder how you could think I’d ever reject you

and wonder who you are but accept you anyway

and tell you about the tree angel enchanted forest boy who flew across the ocean because he loved you

and write poems for you and wonder why you don’t believe me

and have a feeling so deep I can’t find words for it

and want to buy you a kitten I’d get jealous of because it would get more attention than me

and keep you in bed when you have to go

and cry like a baby when you finally do

and get rid of the roaches

and buy you presents you don’t want

and take them away again

and ask you to marry me

and you say no again

but keep on asking

because though you think I don’t mean it

I do always have from the first time I asked you

and wander the city thinking it’s empty without you

and want what you want

and think I’m losing myself but know I’m safe with you

and tell you the worst of me

and try to give you the best of me

because you don’t deserve any less

and answer your questions when I’d rather not

and tell you the truth when I really don’t want to

and try to be honest because I know you prefer it

and think it’s all over but hang on in for just ten more minutes before you throw me out of your life

and forget who I am

and try to get closer to you because it’s a beautiful learning to know you

and well worth the effort and speak German to you badly and Hebrew to you worse

and make love with you at three in the morning

and somehow

somehow

somehow

communicate some of the overwhelming

undying

overpowering

unconditional

all-encompassing

heart-enriching

mind-expanding

on-going

never-ending

love

I have for you.

Sarah Kane, Crave