The grand negotiation amounts to a whitewash operation. The majority of white Trump voters (as distinct from those who like to light up crosses and have no problem with racism) are presently invested in conceptualizing ethical positions in which they can feel not racist while fully and willingly enjoying all the benefits of an openly racist system wherein whiteness has an immense value. This is not new either. Indeed, this is how white America has operated for a long while. […] But the only ethics that matter are act-based ethics—it’s what you do that matters, not what you feel.

Aleksander Hemon, Screw Your Feelings, Slate

Sometimes on the beach we loved each other so much we just wanted to walk together into the sea holding hands because we knew then that we would always be together.

Pier Angeli, on James Dean

They had a year of joy, twelve months of the strange heaven which the salmon know on beds of river shingle, under the gin-clear water. For twenty-four years they were guilty, but this first year was the only one which seemed like happiness. Looking back on it, when they were old, they did not remember that in this year it had ever rained or frozen. The four seasons were coloured like the edge of a rose petal for them.

T.H. White, The Once and Future King

I hoped but never quite believed I would see a female president in my lifetime. At least, not a woman like Hillary Clinton.

If a first female president were someone like, say, Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Palin, or another woman who knew how to play the game and win, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But Hillary Clinton didn’t just play the game; she changed the rules. 

She insisted that women’s rights are human rights, that women can decide the fate of our own bodies, that workers of all races should get paid the same as white men for the same work, that fathers can and should be equal parents, that women’s rights and children’s rights should be fundamental to foreign policy, and that global warming was a reality. That’s why she was, and always has been, supported more by women than by men, more by voters of color than by white voters, and more by scientists than creationists. It’s also why she is deeply and vehemently resented.

Gloria Steinem, After the election of Donald Trump, we will not mourn: we will organize