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“He had the sort of bland, agreeable, rosy face which could disappear into whatever context he wished it to. He was blond but not provocatively so. The naturally dull Kent accent could be clipped and made horsey if he was trying to get to a society party, and his father’s East End adopted with relative ease when he wanted to be taken as working class.”

Quote by Megan Nolan

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Ordinary Human Failings

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Megan Nolan

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“Intersectionality […] is often reduced, in common understanding, to a due consideration of the various axes of oppression and privilege: race, class, sexuality, disability, and so on. […] The central insight of intersectionality is that any liberation movement — feminism, anti-racism, the labor movement — that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of color, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.”

“Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination.”

“Without actually making that confession, her mind went on to imagine what a real love might have been. But such loves do not come in the way of the Miss Moles of this world, and now she was nearly forty. And thinking thus, she allowed the threatening wave of her loneliness, avoided for so long, to sweep over her, and she stood still in the street, helpless while it engulfed her. It fell back, leaving her battered, but on her feet, and longing for a hand to help her upward before she could be swamped again, but she longed in vain and it was a weary woman who walked up Beresford Road and found no comfort in the ruby glow of Mr. Samson’s window curtains. She assumed her usual look of competence as soon as she entered the house. Employers do not expect their servants to have visible emotions, and professional pride straightened her back when she went into the dining room.”

“Not The Done Thing by Stewart Stafford Pass the strawberry conserve here, Layer some cream on top, This is how one eats scones, my dear, We’re not pigs feeding in a trough. Pinky raised when you sip tea, No slurping sounds escaping your mouth, Cucumber sandwiches in tiny triangles, Crusts of bread all cut out. Drawing room dramas over cordials ensue, Gossip exchanged with finest manners, Secrets kept as the cabal breaks up, The public face flew on their banners. © 2021, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

“The working class is the creative class; the working class produces what material wealth exists in a country. And while power is not in their hands, while the working class allows power to remain in the hands of the bosses who exploit them, in the hands of the landlords, the speculators, the monopolies, and in the hands of foreign and national interest groups, while armaments are in the hands of those who service these interest groups and not in their own hands, the working class will be forced to lead a miserable existence no matter how many crumbs those interest groups should let fall from their banquet table.”

“Ellen got off the bus at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fiftythird Street. Rosy twilight was gushing out of the brilliant west, glittered in brass and nickel, on buttons, in people's eyes. All the windows on the east side of the avenue were aflame. As she stood with set teeth on the curb waiting to cross, a frail tendril of fragrance brushed her face. A skinny lad with towhair stringy under a foreignlooking cap was offering her arbutus in a basket. She bought a bunch and pressed her nose in it. May woods melted like sugar against her palate. The whistle blew, gears ground as cars started to pour out of the side streets, the crossing thronged with people. Ellen felt the lad brush against her as he crossed at her side. She shrank away. Through the smell of the arbutus she caught for a second the unwashed smell of his body, the smell of immigrants, of Ellis Island, of crowded tenements. Under all the nickelplated, goldplated streets enameled with May, uneasily she could feel the huddling smell, spreading in dark slow crouching masses like corruption oozing from broken sewers, like a mob. She walked briskly down the cross-street. She went in a door beside a small immaculately polished brass plate.”