University Of Cambridge Alumni

""It was Nigeria. That was the problem. Nigeria felt ugly." (Part 1, Chapter 1, Page 6)"

""England, where people who stared at you would shift their eyes away with an embarrassed, smiling gesture if you stared back. England, where people didn’t see you, where it was almost rude to, wrong to.” (Page 16)"

""In Nigeria, her mother had said, children were always getting themselves into mischief, and surely that was better than sitting inside reading and staring into space all day.” (Part 1, Chapter 3, Page 21)"

"”Jess shrank, her arms raised protectively over her head in anticipation of another blow. Her dad spoke tentatively from behind her: ‘Sarah, I was handling that ...’" (Page 326)"

""Words describing white people, white things, every single story spun out in some place where WE don’t exist! It has no value; in my eyes, it is to confuse.”"

"“In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?”"

"“She encouraged herself to see her very small presence in the world as a good thing, a power, something that a hero might possess.”"

"“And she walked away, and she walked away, and that was that, and that was that.”"

"An anti-heroine has her own purity, a singleness of intention."

"“... it's not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things-- fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too... we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship.”"

"“The general advice is always be yourself, be yourself, which only makes sense if you haven't got an attitude problem.”"

"I sometimes consider a story’s anti-heroine to be an embodied protest against the set of ideals the narrative upholds in the form of the perfect heroine."

"“To you who eat a lot of rice because you are lonely"

"“I've read that madness is present when everything you see and hear takes on an equal significance. A dead bird makes you cry, and so does a doorknob.”"

"“If you should find yourself in a place that is indifferent to you and there is someone there that your spirit stretches to, then that person is kin.”"

"“With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there—not always, but more often than not. With girls, Why her? came up so quickly.”"

"“And without further argument he unsheathed the sword and cleaved Miss Foxe's head from her neck. He knew what was supposed to happen. He knew that this awkward, whispering creature before him should now transform into a princess - dazzlingly beautiful, free, and made wise by her hardship."

"“But then, maybe “I don’t believe in you” is the cruelest way to kill a monster.”"

"“I was born, and then I was quietly resentful of that fact for a few years...but then I went to a library and it was okay.”"

"Without further ado I give you my number one [anti-heroine]: Carabosse, the fairy who goes where she is not invited expressly in order to curse a princess whose life was all set up to be a bright and gracious path from birth to death."

"“For reasons of my own I take note of the way people act when they’re around mirrors.”"

"“… there’s a difference between having no one because you’ve chosen it and having no one because everyone has been taken away.”"

"“What you're doing is building a horrible kind of logic. People read what you write and they say, 'Yes, he is talking about things that really happen,' and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You're explaining things that can't be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre — but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door; it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day's scraping and bowing at work; it was because she was irritating and stupid; it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him; it was because she had to die, she just had to, it makes dramatic sense; it was because 'nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman'; it was because of this, it was because of that. It's obscene to make such things reasonable.”"

"“I wish there was someone I could have written to after that, someone I could have written to explain how awful it was to have someone touch you, then look at you properly and change his mind.”"

"“That's the ideal meeting...once upon a time, only once, unexpectedly, then never again.”"

"“I’m never sad when a friend goes far away, because whichever city or country that friend goes to, they turn the place friendly. They turn a suspicious-looking name on the map into a place where a welcome can be found. Maybe the friend will talk about you sometimes, to other friends that live around him, and then that’s almost as good as being there yourself. You’re in several places at once! In fact, my daughter, I would even go so far as to say that the further away your friends, and the more spread out they are the better your chances of going safely through the world…”"

"“The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it’s ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot.”"

"“It occurred to me that I was unhappy. And it didn’t feel so very terrible. No urgency, nothing. I could slip out of my life on a slow wave like this—it didn’t matter. I don’t have to be happy. All I have to do is hold on to something and wait.”"

"“It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one.”"

"“Solitary people, these book lovers. I think it's swell that there are people you don't have to worry about when you don't see them for a long time, you don't have to wonder what they do, how they're getting along with themselves. You just know that they're all right, and probably doing something they like.”"

"“Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that's supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone's crossed the line.”"

"“I know of witches who whistle at different pitches, calling things that don't have names.”"

"“A library at night is full of sounds: the unread books can't stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.”"

"Sleeping Beauty is not herself, and doesn’t become so until the isolation of her hundred-year sleep, during which she must dream her own dreams. Carabosse’s curse is the most meaningful gift the girl could have been given."

"Aubrey is one of the kindest and most generous people I have ever known. He only ever treated me with respect and kindness. I never saw him intentionally disrespect anyone."

"When I was much younger I had a couple of relationships with women who were very smart but, being teenaged, had not had time to demonstrate it. It was important to them that I not compliment them too much on their (very considerable) physical attributes, and I respected that at the time and still do. But for those of us who have already achieved plenty in life, and who thus have nothing to prove, the same does not apply. I have a mission in life, and I have no compunction whatsoever in furthering it by means that have nothing to do with my intellect, whether that be my ability to feign a reasonably aristocratic accent or my own physical attributes. Similarly, I view it as not only acceptable but positively recommended that those of my colleagues who are similarly committed to this same mission should take whatever advantage may be available, of whatever attributes they may possess, to influence those who have major potential to further that mission - and, to the extent that they do so without even thinking about it, that they not be all coy and in denial they they do so. There’s a war on, my friend; there's no time to be all pompous about some hypothetical greater value of those enviable features that one has earned through hard work over those that one was born with. We need to work with what we have, however we obtained it."

"It is at the same level of women in World War II sleeping with Nazis to get information. It is a war against aging here. You have to persuade people to give money. That is honestly who I am. I am the general. .. It is just not possible I could have said anything like this to [Complainant #2] in 2018. […] I would not dream of saying anything remotely along those lines. I have not used any of my staff in terms of womanhood in that way. I put my scientists next to donors to talk science."

"I define aging as the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us."

"I am at last in a position to apologise - which I gladly do publicly - to Laura Deming for my email to her in 2012, about which I had forgotten until the investigator reminded me of it. As STAT reported three weeks ago, I consider that that email would have been a mistake even if she had been five years older, because we were in a mentor-mentee relationship. I catgorically deny Laura's current (though, as she made clear on August 10th, not contemporaneous) view, shared by the investigator, that I sent that email with improper intent - but my email does not become OK just because improper intent is now being misread into it."

"I don't feel the need to subtweet that one - Aubrey is an absolutely terrible human being"

"If we are to bring about real regenerative therapies that will benefit not just future generations, but those of us who are alive today, we must encourage scientists to work on the problem of aging"

"I had one bad experience with him when I was 17 - he told me in writing that he had an ‘adventurous love life’ and that it had ‘always felt quite jarring’ not to let conversations with me stray in that direction given that ‘[he] could treat [me] as an equal on every other level’. He sent this from his work email, and I’d known him since I was 14."

"Aubrey de Grey is a sexual predator. For years he has used his position of power in the aging field to attract his victims. These victims include me, Laura Deming, and multiple other anonymous women. Laura was a minor when Aubrey came on to her; I was a SENS-funded student. Aubrey’s proclivities are a long held open secret in the aging field."

"we find Dr. de Grey purposefully and knowingly disregarded multiple directives (from the acting Executive Director, this investigator, and his own counsel) to retain the confidentiality of the investigation. In his interview, Dr. de Grey not only admitted to this conduct, he made unreasonable efforts to justify it ..Dr. de Grey’s unapologetic interference with the investigation by reaching out to a witness through a third party and repeatedly posting about the investigation has generated angry attacks on the accusers and perpetuated misinformation (i.e., that he has been exonerated)"

"Scientist Aubrey de Grey made inappropriate sexual comments to two female entrepreneurs, independent investigation finds"

"A life spent chasing the mythical state of being able to do everything is less meaningful than a life of focusing on a few things that count."

"I think the reason that we seek distraction is that working on stuff that we care about is often scary. It brings us into contact with all the ways in which we’re limited—our talents might not be up to what we’re trying to do, and we can’t control how things will unfold."

"[W]e’re living in a world with effectively infinite inputs—emails you could receive, demands that could be made of you, or ambitions that you could have. Getting better at moving through them is not going to get you to the end of them, so the promise of reaching a point at which you feel on top of everything is flawed on a math basis from the beginning."

"[T]he more efficient you get, the more inputs you attract. If you get really good at processing email, you’ll get more email because you get a reputation for being responsive on email. The same idea applies elsewhere: If your reputation in the office is that you’re good at getting through work fast, you’re given more things to do."

"A great deal of politics is debate about what the limits of politics are, how they are determined and whether those limits can and should be altered through politics. To call something limited implies that it is restricted and inadequate, and should be overcome. But to many critics of contemporary politics, it is our failure to respect either natural or social or epistemic limits which is the cause of our present problems."