abislofabook

[abislofabook]

And there it is. He's been teetering on the edge of letting go of this specific dream for months now, terrified of it, but the relief is startling, a mountain off his back.

Casey McQuinston, Red, White, & Royal Blue

#casey mcquiston #red white and royal blue

[abislofabook]

"I'm sorry, Henry," she says. "I've failed you. I've failed all of you. You needed your mum, and I wasn't there. And I was so frightened that I started to think maybe it was for the best, to let you all be kept behind glass." She turns back to her mother. "Look at them, Mum. They're not props of a legacy. They're my children. And I swear on my life, and Arthur's, I will take you off the throne before I will let them feel the things you made me feel."

Casey McQuinston, Red, White, & Royal Blue

#casey mcquiston #red white and royal blue

[abislofabook]

Henry's jaw is tight, but it's not anger, only fear. Alex can see on his face an expression he recognizes: Henry wondering if it's safe to accept the love offered to him, and wanting desperately to take it regardless.

Casey McQuinston, Red, White, & Royal Blue

#casey mcquiston #red white and royal blue

[abislofabook]

Henry flinches like he's been physically slapped. Alex can see it now—this is how he was broken down over the years. Maybe not always as explicitly, but always there, always implied. Remember your place.

Casey McQuinston, Red, White, & Royal Blue

#casey mcquiston #red white and royal blue

[abislofabook]

I love him, with all that, because of all that. On purpose. I love him on purpose.

Casey McQuinston, Red, White, & Royal Blue

#casey mcquiston #red white and royal blue

[abislofabook]

"Do you understand?" she asks him, looking right into his eyes. "You need to understand this to be with Henry. He is the most loving, nurturing, selfless person you could hope to meet, but there is a sadness and a hurt in him that is tremendous, and you may very well never truly understand it, but you need to love it as much as you love the rest of him, because that's him. That is him, part and parcel. And he is prepared to give it all to you, which is far more than I ever, in a thousand years, thought I would see him do."

Casey McQuinston, Red, White, & Royal Blue

#casey mcquiston #red white and royal blue

[abislofabook]

"So, imagine we're all born with a set of feelings. Some are broader or deeper than others, but for everyone, there's that ground floor, a bottom crust of the pie. That's the maximum depth of feeling you've ever experienced. And then, the worst thing happens to you. The very worst thing that could have happened. The thing you had nightmares about as a child, and you thought, it's all right because that thing will happen to me when I'm older and wiser, and I'll have felt so many feelings by then that this one worst feeling, the worst possible feeling, won't seem so terrible.

"But it happens to you when you're young. It happens when your brain isn't even fully done cooking—when you've barely experienced anything, really. The worst thing is one of the first big things that ever happens to you in your life. It happens to you, and it goes all the way down to the bottom of what you know how to feel, and it rips it open and carves out this chasm down below to make room. And because you were so young, and because it was one of the first big things to happen in your life, you'll always carry it inside you. Every time something terrible happens to you from then on, it doesn't just stop at the bottom—it goes all the way down."

Casey McQuinston, Red, White, & Royal Blue

#casey mcquiston #red white and royal blue

[abislofabook]

There are the flaws everyone's allowed to see—his big mouth, his mercurial temper, his searing impulses—and then there's this. It's like how he only wears his glasses when nobody's around: Nobody's supposed to see how much he needs.

Casey McQuinston, Red, White, & Royal Blue

#casey mcquiston #red white and royal blue

[abislofabook]

He wants to set himself on fire, but he can’t afford for anyone to see him burn.

Casey McQuinston, Red, White, & Royal Blue

#casey mcquiston #red white and royal blue

[abislofabook]

When Alex was a kid, before anyone knew his name, he dreamed of love like it was a fairy tale, as if it would come sweeping into his life on the back of a dragon one day. When he got older, he learned about love as a strange thing that could fall apart no matter how badly you wanted it, a choice you make anyway. He never imagined it’d turn out he was right both times.

Casey McQuinston, Red, White, & Royal Blue

#casey mcquiston #red white and royal blue

[abislofabook]

There's this way Henry has of listening to the erratic stream of consciousness that pours out of Alex's mouth and answering with the clearest, crystallized truth that Alex has been trying to arrive at all along. If Alex's head is a storm, Henry is the place lightning hits ground.

Casey McQuinston, Red, White, & Royal Blue

#casey mcquiston #red white and royal blue

[abislofabook]

Whereas cultural institutions such as medicine, war and industrialization make nondisabled people into disabled people all the time, they also develop technology, treatment and policies that attenuate the disjuncture between our bodies and minds and a world built for the normal. The eugenic aspirations of our current moment use nothing as crude as gas chambers to improve the human race, but nonetheless assiduously advance medical normalization and experimentation, prenatal testing and selective termination, genetic modification, physician-aided dying, withholding treatment and resource distribution to eradicate disability—and, often enough, people with disabilities. A widely shared philosophy from practical ethicists such as Peter Singer provocatively supports a liberal eugenics that permits euthanizing certain disabled newborns. Many of the writers collected here live uneasily with medical conditions explicitly targeted for extermination in the past and for elimination today.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times

#Rosemarie Garland-Thomson #About Us #About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times

[abislofabook]

Those of us who wear the label “disabled” carry a heavy history. Even though human and civil rights-based precedent decree that we are both morally and legally of equal worth to our fellow citizens, assured of our rights, and protected under the law, a glance at the distant or even the recent history of people with disabilities reminds us of our grim vulnerability. The pronouncements of degeneracy, defect, unfitness and burden that confined us to asylums, hospitals, segregated schools and hidden back rooms are only a few decades in the past. In 1927, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes authorized involuntary sterilization for people deemed “feebleminded,” justifying that opinion by declaring that "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times

#Rosemarie Garland-Thomson #About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times #About Us

[abislofabook]

I began to see disability not as a category, but rather a spectrum on which we all occupy a place. I began to understand disability itself as a “two-way street”—defined not just by a person's physical or biological makeup, but also by the degree to which social and structural barriers like lack of accessibility and accommodations prevent that person's full participation in society

Peter Catapano, About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times

#peter catapano #About Us #About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times

[abislofabook]

Thus King Dolor's reign passed, year after year, long and prosperous. Whether he was happy—“as happy as a king”—is a question no human being can decide. But I think he was, because he had the power of making everybody about him happy, and did it too . . .

Miss Mulock, The Little Lame Prince

#miss mulock #Dinah Maria Mulock Craik #the little lame prince #the little lame prince and his travelling cloak

[abislofabook]

Thus, though he never walked in processions, never reviewed his troops mounted on a magnificent charger, nor did any of the things which make a show monarch so much appreciated, he was able for all the duties and a great many of the pleasures of his rank. When he held his levées, not standing, but seated on a throne, ingeniously contrived to hide his infirmity, the people thronged to greet him; when he drove out through the city streets, shouts followed him wherever he went—every countenance brightened as he passed, and his own, perhaps, was the brightest of all.

First, because, accepting his affliction as inevitable, he took it patiently; second, because, being a brave man, he bore it bravely; trying to forget himself, and live out of himself, and in and for other people. Therefore other people grew to love him so well, that I think hundreds of his subjects might have been found who were almost ready to die for their poor lame King

Miss Mulock, The Little Lame Prince

#miss mulock #Dinah Maria Mulock Craik #the little lame prince #the little lame prince and his travelling cloak

[abislofabook]

However, the cruel things which had been once foreboded of him did not happen. His misfortune was not such a heavy one after all. It proved to be much less inconvenience, even to himself, than had been feared. A council of eminent surgeons and mechanicians invented for him a wonderful pair of crutches, with the help of which, though he never walked easily or gracefully, he did manage to walk, so as to be quite independent. And such was the love his people bore him that they never heard the sound of his crutch on the marble palace-floors without the leap of the heart, for they knew that good was coming to them whenever he approached them.

Miss Mulock, The Little Lame Prince

#miss mulock #Dinah Maria Mulock Craik #the little lame prince #the little lame prince and his travelling cloak