37 Quotes by Jia Tolentino

At a basic level, Facebook, like most other forms of social media, runs on doublespeak: advertising connection but creating isolation; promising happiness but inculcating dread.

The nature of a revelation is that you don't have to experience it; you don't even have to believe whatever is revealed to hang on to it for as long as you want. In the seventies, researchers believed that MDMA treatment would be discrete and limited—that once you got the message, as they put it, you hang up the phone. You would be better for having listened. You would be changed.They don't say this about religion, but they should.

In the introduction to "The Second Sex" (1949), de Beauvoir writes that the "drama of woman" lies in the conflict between the individual experience of the self and the collective experience of womanhood. To herself, a woman is inherently central and essential. To society, she is inessential, secondary, defined on the terms of her relationship to men.

I cling to the Milan women's understanding of these literary heroines as mothers. I wish I had learned to read them in this way years ago—with the same complicated, ambivalent, essential freedom that a daughter feels when she looks at her mother, understanding her as a figure that she simultaneously resists and depends on; a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and gratefully, as the base from which to become something more.

To argue against an ideology, you have to acknowledge and articulate it. In the process, you might inadvertently ventriloquize your opposition. This is a problem that kneecaps me constantly, a problem that might define journalism in the Trump era: when you write against something, you lend it strength and space and time.

To use Amazon—which I did regularly for years with full knowledge of its labor practices—is to accept and embrace a world in which everything is worth as little as possible; even, and maybe particularly, people.

Resistance to a system is almost always presented on the terms of the system. It’s so much easier, when we gain agency, to use it to adapt rather than to oppose.

A woman is unruly if anyone has incorrectly decided that she’s too much of something, and if she, in turn, has chosen to believe that she’s just fine.

As wealth continues to flow upward, as Americans are increasingly shut out of their own democracy, as political action is constrained into online spectacle, I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional -- to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.