10 Quotes by Carolyn Ives Gilman

Forgetting is what nature does best. The universe is a huge forgetting machine. It erases information no matter how hard we try to hang onto it. How could it be any different? What if the memory of everything that ever happened still existed? The universe would be clogged with information, so packed with it we couldn’t move. We’d be paralyzed, because every moment we ever lived would still be with us. It would be hell.

I may not know what my heart truly holds, but who does? I think we're all mysteries, even to ourselves.

Powerlessness is such a lure, such a poisonous lure.

I'm perfectly natural the way I am. Why can't you humans ever understand that I might not want to be afflicted with gender?

To die this way seems so random, so trivial. I have been robbed of meaning before being robbed of life. To die in darkness, alone -- for what purpose was I ever alive. It is as if I emerged from darkness into delusion, then sank back into darkness forever.

I knew I was really there, because I was the thing his arms encircled, the thing his love defined.

We’re all inadequate,” David answered. “Just think: the light from the outside world is mapped onto the retina, then further mapped onto the visual cortex, then broken apart and analyzed in other areas of the brain. At every step there’s a loss of information. In the end, what we are aware of is not the outside world per se, but the image of the world projected onto our brains. Plato was anatomically right; we do see shadows on a wall.

I didn’t know it then, but I could never turn back once I had learned this. To see something you must cease to be it.

I’m perfectly natural the way I am. Why can’t you humans ever understand that I might not want to be afflicted with gender?