Brittany Archibald

[R]efusing to monetize a hobby is inherently anti-capitalist. Pursuing a hobby takes privilege, yes, but it also takes a huge amount of determination to carve out personal time in our high-pressure, high-velocity culture. Capitalism compels people to monetize their time, their talents, their joys, often rewarded only with small returns exhausting burnout. By participating in a hobby for your own joy you reclaim your time and refuse to feed into the more, more, more mindset. In this way, cultivating free time is radical. It is the mark of an intentional life. Sewing not only brings my life more in line with my personal values and allows me to participate in the larger fashion dialogue in a more ethical way, it is also a cherished creative outlet.

Ashley M. Jones

Surely, heaven is a place where men can't make anyplace
a dangerous corner—

surely, there, a smile is a smile and not a taunt.

-excerpt from "Oil Change," published in Reparations Now! Copyright © 2021 by Ashley M. Jones

In an email newsletter from the Washington Post: "Ashley M. Jones has been appointed the Poet Laureate of Alabama. She is the first Black person and, at 31, the youngest poet to hold the position since Alabama created it in 1930. Her new book, "Reparations Now!," offers a diverse, complex collection of poems in response to historical and contemporary racism. In a few lines, she can slip from weary to witty to wary – but never defeated."

Mireille Silcoff

"In a consumer culture, minimalism was always a somewhat fancyland ruse. It was domestic anorexia sold as health; materialism repackaged as its opposite; perfectionism hawked as peace. It was the perversion of labelling a home curated down to zero the ultimate luxury or, worse, virtue."

https://thewalrus.ca/more-is-more-the-end-of-minimalism/

Bernie Sanders

Do I consider myself part of the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little? No, I don't.

--from the book Necessary Trouble (2016) by Sarah Jaffe. In the first Democratic debate between candidates for the 2016 presidential election, Sanders was asked if he was a capitalist.

Emma Thompson

Q [People Magazine]: Do you enjoy playing villains?

Emma Thompson: I loved it. I feel I'm growing towards monstrosity year by year. I'm just getting more and more difficult and unpleasant. No acting required really.

Savala Nolan

I can't watch the dead-girl SVUs anymore. I can't watch the dead-girl movies or read the dead-girl books. I can't listen to the dead-girl podcasts or read the dead-girl articles. I know many women can. Many women make them! And they have their reasons, whether because they are too colonized to see the cannibalization or because they've passed through the vortex and emerged, enlightened, into some post-gendered-violence world that I can't imagine, or something else. But I can't do it. I have shut the door to my mind; I don't want to take it in. 

--in Don't Let It Get You Down (2021)

Isaac Mizrahi

How do you know if two prints work together? Like, a print and a stripe? Here's how you know: if you like it. If you like it, darling, it's right.

Jessica Berta

The pandemic has forced me into the present. It's a meditation I never wanted but have come to appreciate. That said, last week I kicked a hole in the bathroom door.

from NYTimes 4/5/2021 Elizabeth Dias and Audra D.S. Burch 'Who We Are Now'

John Green

“The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.” The Fault in Our Stars

Jill Biden

"My message is: never forget that what you're doing matters," she said. "Right now, someone out there is a better thinker because of you. Someone is standing a little taller because you helped them find the confidence they need…. And someone is kinder because you showed them what that meant."

--at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting (Jan 26, 2021)

Henry David Thoreau

Live in each season as it passes: breathe in the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.--

 

dk

"Jacob"

"Finally, I realized that my relationship with her had brought me nothing but stress and unhappiness for, at that point, really years," he said. "That smart, awesome person that I used to know just didn't exist anymore. So I decided to cut my losses and cauterize the wound." 

--"Jacob," about his mother and her belief in QAnon conspiracy theories via https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/14/qanon-families-support-group/

Rob McCall

Just as we store up fuel and food during the warm months to sustain us through the cold, we can store up plans, dreams and visions during the cold months to inspire and guide us when the leaves again return to the trees. It is a time to look back and pack up the past, then look forward to form the future.

Plot out your next garden or book or painting or wedding. Sketch the new boat or the new out-building or the new world. Dream up new schemes to save money or energy or time or the planet. Envision a trip beyond the far corners of your town, or beyond the far corners of your mind. In a warm window, start seeds of broccoli and beauty, cilantro and silence, hollyhocks and hope, cabbage and compassion, peas and peace, to enrich the dreams of a bleak midwinter.

Some Glad Morning: Holding Hope in Apocalyptic Times. Wainscott, New York: Pushcart Press, 2020, p. 108, "She Sleeps." 

John Gray

“If you can do anything,” he told me, “then the solution to time scarcity is only to do the things that you really think are worth doing, and nothing else.”

Nikki Giovanni

Her staying power over half a century comes from a stream of acclaimed work, her proclivity for a punishing schedule of tours and readings, and a fearlessness born of not caring what foolish people think.

"The best thing you can do for yourself is to not pay attention," Giovanni said during a video interview from her home in Christiansburg, Va.

"People who pay attention all end up on drugs or alcohol, or crazy, or mean," she added. "You can't let people you don't know decide who you are."  

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/books/nikki-giovanni-make-me-rain.html