I Am Not A Fan Of Book Banning For Almost Any Reason (and Even Then It Should Be Centered More Around

i am not a fan of book banning for almost any reason (and even then it should be centered more around letting people use their discretion to say “um maybe kids shouldn’t be reading erotica” than “this topic is ugly and opens the door to too many questions so we just shouldn’t talk about it”) but so much of book banning revolves around this very idea, that if a book so much as mentions a difficult topic, we shouldn’t talk about it, rather than the way the topic itself is handled

"this work is problematic because of how it handles [subject]": reasonable premise for media criticism

"this work is problematic because it depicts [subject]": do not pass go do not collect $200 this is, as a general rule, a functionally reactionary and conservative argument

i went to alphaville and everyone there asked if you really want to live forever

bro, you only lasted 7 months at the experimental transcendentalist utopian commune? rip to nathaniel hawthorne but i’m different

you wear an ancestor’s face

i think i figured it out! it isn’t that i fall in love with people because of their beauty, it’s that because i have fallen in love with who they are, they appear infinitely more beautiful to me

“There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested.There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation”

— Kate Chopin, The Awakening