Veselka Quotes

Because that's the way it is when a possibility opens up; the body doesn't know any better. It reaches for the glittering incongruity. ~ Vanessa Veselka

I would love to love something, especially if I could do it without feeling like I was watching it die right in front of me. ~ Vanessa Veselka

Britta wanted to try to turn a guard. Tamara thought it was idiotic.
"What are you going to do? Buy him beer and tell him about Kropotkin?"
I envisioned the conversation:
Vanguard: Wage Slave, are you aware that you are but a wire nail in the toolbox of capitalism?
Wage Slave: I thought I was a chisel.
Vanguard: No, the petit bourgeois are the chisels.
Wage Slave: What about a washer set? Can I be a washer set?
Vanguard: No, my ferret, run free! For I have unlocked your collar with knowledge!
Wage Slave: I want to be a chisel.
Vanguard pushes screaming ferret through hole in fence cut by the clippers of noblesse oblige.
"Well, maybe we could bribe him," said Britta. Tamara laughed.
"With what? Health insurance? ~ Vanessa Veselka

I felt my pride like a prison. ~ Vanessa Veselka

The equation Bubble Tea = Something to Look Forward To depressurizes the misery of capitalism and is a Hello Kitty band-aid on the festering wound of Neo-Liberalism. ~ Vanessa Veselka

I looked at the woman crying over the doll and felt something else. I was sick of people acting against their own interests. Mooing about how to refinance the slaughterhouse. Putting skylights in the killing pen and pretending the bolt in the brain was a pathway to a better field. I paid my bill. Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book, I thought. ~ Vanessa Veselka

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom - we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you're a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can't go anywhere if you can't step out onto a road ...
... (T)here is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it's not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people's ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable. ~ Vanessa Veselka

I was not afraid of horror, I was afraid of beauty, of what it could do to me if I let it. ~ Vanessa Veselka

You could always industrialize," she refilled Jimmy's wine glass. "You know, get a job stunning chickens in a factory to earn the trust of the working class." Jimmy laughed again and accidentally spat Chablis on my legs. "It's a pretty silly idea, isn't it?" said Grace, getting a rag. "Leaping out of the closet in a crisis?" She lowered her voice, "Don't worry, sir. I'm a revolutionary socialist. Everything's going to be okay. ~ Vanessa Veselka

I like to think of myself as a coworker with lots of experience rather than a boss, Franklin said.
I like to think of myself as a boss more than a slave but mostly I prefer to not think about it at all because when I think about it, I can't stop. ~ Vanessa Veselka

Oh, you must be part of the underground no one's ever heard about."
"I don't belong to any group outside of my friends."
"That's a real bridge builder."
But it was a pretty hollow response. I wasn't part of any group either, and not just because my wiring was shot and I cried all the time, but because I had never met anyone in any political organization that I liked. ~ Vanessa Veselka