Kimberly Hirsh

📚💬 “Life is absurd. It has no meaning. But it has beauty, and wonder, and we have to enjoy that.” Frieda Menco, Holocaust survivor, quoted in Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City by Russell Shorto

📚💬 “Be open to the possibility that you are bigger, more magical, more powerful than you dare imagine, that you are here to do something that is necessary and consequential and that only you can do.” Bakara Wintner in WTF Is Tarot? And How Do I Do It?, on XX JUDGMENT

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“None of this had been fated; none of it foretold… They were just the people who had shown up and managed to survive.
But maybe that was the trick of it: to survive, to dare to stay alive, to forge your own hope when all hope had run out.” Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves

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“I am most interested in confessional writing when it allows us to move into the personal as a way to go beyond it. In all my work I invoke the personal as a prelude.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

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“I had been so well socialized by graduate school that I was torn between which writing path to pursue, agonizing over whether I could write from various standpoints in various genres.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

💬📚 “I don’t remember my own story… I remember only how I fell into books, never to rise from their pages, how I was never truly awake until I began to dream of other worlds.” Leigh Bardugo, The Lives of Saints ❤️ Saint of the Book

💬📚 “We give the people we mother our bodies, and what they will recall is our presence and heat, our animal closeness.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “I don’t believe care work has to wreck us. This labor can be shared, social, collective—and transformative.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “Those who mother are the sanitation workers of bodies— handling the refuse, the filth and putrescence, living in the stink.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

For Garbes, mothering is a type of care work not reserved exclusively for parents.

📚💬 “Proximity to power, however real that feels, is a simpler choice than solidarity. True allyship lives in relationships, true solidarity requires giving up some comfort, material resources, and power—and sharing it with others.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “The perspective mothers bring to their jobs—whether it’s law making, coalition building, project management—is that family and care work are essential to life, not an inconvenience.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “We are entrusting that which we say is most precious—our children, our future— to other people, yet we are not willing to pay them a living wage? What does that say about our priorities as a society? Our priorities as individuals?” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “Childcare professionals, many of them mothers, are three times as likely to live in poverty as workers in other professions.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “Weekends aren’t time off for parents; they are two long days of caregiving.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “Early on in quarantine, I found myself thinking, ‘What is the most valuable thing I could be doing with my time?’ The answer clearly wasn’t writing an article or making a podcast, but rather, keeping my family, and my community, safe and healthy.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “The acafan… is one who is able to occupy the spaces of both fandom and academia and speak authoritatively on both.” A Fan Studies Primer, “Introduction,” edited by Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams

💬📚 “Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.” J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring