Intellectual Wallpaper

I've been collecting quotes and passages I liked for over fifteen years. You can see my progression as a person and my changing interests as they go along. I decided to put them out there for the Internet to see so it's not just me enjoying them. Some are from pop culture, some from authors, podcasts and journalists, some are even from my family and friends. I hope you find something useful, inspirational, moving, amusing, weird- or all of the above. If you want you can check out my personal Tumblr at piratelawyer.tumblr.com. It's about as random as this.

[momentsinreading]

“Statistically, the odds are stacked against a working class person - most people with careers in the arts come from middle and upper classes because they have the supports to make it. It is expensive to make it in a career that often pays so little, it is not a choice that is open to working class and poor people, they cannot afford to fail when the necessities of life are on the line.” – Kate Beaton

[momentsinreading]

“Everyone you ever knew who told you that they would keep you safe as long as you behaved were already hurting you. Live your life without apology. It is never wrong to tell the truth about who you are.” -Brennan Lee Mulligan

[momentsinreading]

“At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fucking boxes! People need to be fucking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then fuck off.’” -Ncuti Gatwa Elle interview

[momentsinreading]

“The fear of being fat is the fear of joining an underclass that you have so readily dismissed, looked down on, looked past, or found yourself grateful not to be a part of. It is a fear of being seen as slothful, gluttonous, greedy, unambitious, unwanted, and, worst of all, unlovable. Fat has largely been weaponized by straight-size people — the very people it seems to hurt most deeply. And ultimately, thin people are terrified of being treated the way they have so often seen fat people treated or even the way they’ve treated fat people themselves. In that way, thinness isn’t just a matter of health or beauty or happiness. It is a cultural structure of power and dominance.” - Aubrey Gordon

[momentsinreading]

“I remember asking my mother once: 'Why my dad? What did you love about him?' She had to think for a while before she could think of anything to say. Then she said: 'I knew he would never hit me'. It really shows how the behavior of violent men makes the non-violent men look good by comparison. It puts women under tremendous pressure to lower their expectations. 'You should be grateful for not having the terrible things you could have had'. I experience it a lot as a man, getting a lot of credit for doing things I simply ought to be doing. Particularly as a father. People will fall all over you for doing things that a mother would never get any credit or praise for. The domestic batterer plays a really critical role in society, in keeping women down...he is using violence to keep that women and those children down.  And his violence is also keeping all women and all children down at the same time. It may not be strictly speaking his intent, but it's the effect.” - Lundy Bancroft

[momentsinreading]

[re Ozempic] “The fact that [fat people] have been through so many rounds of this, it's like, ‘Why aren't you on Fen Phen? Why aren't you on bariatric surgery? Why aren't you clean eating?’ All this is just new packaging for like ‘Why aren't you thin?’ And that is worth listening to. This isn't like a paranoid fantasy on the part of fat people. This is something that they've been through numerous times over the course of their lifetimes now. We're just doing the same thing again even when the data does not remotely indicate that we're not going to have fat people anymore. It never has. We're always going to have fat people and there's always going to be people, whatever the medical intervention is, that can't use it or it doesn't work for them or they've tried it already, that's always going to be the case. The fact that people are so obsessed with asking the question, ‘Is this the end of obesity?’, like really early, ‘Is this going to be the reason we don't have fat people around anymore?’, it's like it's so fucking telling.” – Michael Hobbes on Maintenance Phase

[momentsinreading]

[re Ozempic] “We should also say, like, ‘Listen, you will face serious, serious fucking stigma as a person who stays fat’. Trust me, a person who has stayed fat totally through all the interventions. I've already sort of started shifting socially. You know I'm already a very homebody, indoorsy kind of lady, and I'm already restricting who I socialize with pretty dramatically because of this kind of talk and because I'm unwilling to be in spaces where this shit will come up. And for me, that means functionally like, a vast majority of people I know who are not fat and some people I know who are. I just want people to understand the stakes of this as a fat person are, ‘I feel like I don't belong in the world’. When people talk about how great it's going to be when I'm not around, that's not me being too sensitive, that's not fat people taking it too hard, that's you saying plainly, ‘Everything will better when you're gone’. And then, fat people like taking that message, that's horrible.” – Aubrey Gordon on Maintenance Phase

[momentsinreading]

“[The last series I binged (or watched a lot of) was…] this is really sad, but it’s true… Inspector Morse. My brain is honestly broken. I watched so many detective series and was running out of new ones, so I started going backwards. I’ve seen Miss Marple, Inspector Lewis and Endeavour – the spin-off and the sequel. So I thought I might as well watch the original. It’s so dark inside my mind. These shows are soothing in a weird way – the danger’s not real, it’s kind of familiar but there are little twists. There’s a fun timidity to the British murder mystery.” -Ayo Edebiri

[momentsinreading]

“You don't know the first thing about piracy, do ya? It's not about glory. It's not about gettin' what you want. It's about belonging to something when the world has told you you're nothin'. It's about finding the family to kill for when yours are long dead. It's about letting go of ego for something larger. The crew.” -Izzy on Our Flag Means Death

[momentsinreading]

[re Jack the Ripper tours] “It’s a mistake to stop natural curiosity, but what it needs is a kind of redirection or correction. There’s a lot of gore peddling. It’s important to remember that the people killed were real and lived real lives.” – Hallie Rubenhold

[momentsinreading]

“My cemetery’s in Key Biscayne. It’s one of the prettiest in the world.  The sky is blue, palm trees, rolling hills. The one is Los Copa’s really shit. What a pain in the ass you are. And it’s true: you’re not young, you’re not new, and you do make people laugh. And me? I’m still with you because you make me laugh. So you know what I got to do? I got to sell my plot in Key Biscayne so I can get one next to you in that shithole Los Copa, so I never miss a laugh.” – Armand in The Birdcage

[momentsinreading]

“They really fear lesbians. Because in some strange level, let us never forget the ever-expanding gaseous state of the male ego. Which is men still believe that women do everything in response to them. Therefore, for a lot of these guys, a woman’s a lesbian because she hasn’t had him. He will change this dolorous experience and she will of course love men because of him. The truth is, women aren’t lesbians because of men. Women are lesbians because of women: they love women! And that’s what drives them crazy, they don’t want to accept that central fact of lesbian life, which is it has nothing whatsoever to do with men. And never will.” — Rita Mae Brown in The Celluloid Closet

[momentsinreading]

“And the only thing, the only fucking thing that lets people stand by, watching all this suffering, doing nothing, doing fucking nothing, is the idea that suffering can be a gift from God. What a monstrous idea, Father.” -Riley on Midnight Mass

[momentsinreading]

“A few days prior, at a Q&A after one of my readings, a young man in the audience raised his hand: Do you believe in ghosts? “Well, that depends.” I told him. “What is a ghost?” What I love most about ghost stories is their malleability. A ghost can be a heart beating beneath a floorboard. A father, appearing to his son to beg for vengeance. A party dress worn by your husband’s first wife, which you, the new wife, now don. A ghost can be a house, or a mirror, or a shadow. It would be reductive to define ghost-hood as simply a deceased person’s spirit appearing in the mortal realm. So then, how do we define a ghost? I personally have one, simple definition: a ghost is a manifestation of longing.” — GennaRose Nethercott

[momentsinreading]

“When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek:The Wrath of Khan, where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the 2 long time buddies. both of them are reaching out towards each other, their hands pressed hard against the glass, trying to establish physical contact. they both have so much they want to say and so little time to say it. Spock calls Kirk his friend, the fullest expression of their feelings anywhere in the series. almost everyone who watches the scene feels the passion the two men share, the hunger for something more than what they are allowed. And, I tell my nonfan listeners, slash is what happens when you take away the glass.” Henry Jenkins, USC professor 

[momentsinreading]

You’re such a pioneer of American indie cinema. Do you think a career like the one you’ve cut out for yourself and enjoyed over the years is possible anymore? How do you view the current state of American moviemaking coming out of the pandemic?

“It feels like it’s gone with the wind — or gone with the algorithm. Sometimes I’ll talk to some of my contemporaries who I came up with during the 1990s, and we’ll go, “Oh my God, we could never get that done today.” So, on the one hand, selfishly, you think, “I guess I was born at the right time. I was able to participate in what always feels like the last good era for filmmaking.” And then you hope for a better day. But, man, the way distribution has fallen off. Sadly, it’s mostly just the audience. Is there a new generation that really values cinema anymore? That’s the dark thought.

“I have a film society and I run into so many young, cinema-loving kids who have the Criterion Channel and they watch all kinds of amazing movies. But I know that, culturally, that’s an exception. I fear that there’s not enough of a critical mass in the culture to sustain what was. But who knows? I don’t think I have any deeper analysis than anyone else would, and it’s not in my nature to make huge statements about whether it’s all over. I just feel we’re all treading water and hoping we don’t drown. Challenging times are certainly here.

“With a changing culture and changing technology, it’s hard to see cinema slipping back into the prominence it once held. I think we could feel it coming on when they started calling films “content” — but that’s what happens when you let tech people take over your industry. It’s hard to imagine indie cinema in particular having the cultural relevance that it did. It’s hard to imagine the whole culture is going to be on the same page about anything, much less filmmaking. We can be self-absorbed and say it’s just about cinema, but it’s really all of our modern cultural life. You could say the same things about reading books. A lot of young people can’t really read a book, because they’re just on their phones.

“Some really intelligent, passionate, good citizens just don’t have the same need for literature and movies anymore. It doesn’t occupy the same space in the brain. I think that’s just how we’ve given over our lives, largely, to this thing that depletes the need for curating and filling ourselves up with meaning from art and fictional worlds. That need has been filled up with — let’s face it — advanced delivery systems for advertising. It’s sad, but what can you do? I also don’t want to go through life thinking our best days are behind us. That’s just not productive. So, in your own area, you just have to persist and do what you can on behalf of the things that you believe in. You have to believe that everything can change and that things can go back to being a little better. Isn’t that what we all want for everything these days, from democracy on down? Can’t we just go back to being a little better?” - Richard Linklater interview in The Hollywood Reporter

[momentsinreading]

“queer not as being about who you are having sex with, that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” -bell hooks