Books

"I can make two or three hundred bucks a day hanging out with these dudes, or $7.50 an hour."

Problems, Jade Sharma

"I was paralyzed, of course, finding out that our lives are so exactly, insanely alike. It's not fair, that she gets to say all these things, when I was the one with the stage, and I probably lived all this first, and I was getting cheated on, and I took him back, and I was doing the worse thing, the surveys, not the phone contracts, and I was older, and more humiliated, and I was paid multiple times for my body, but never because I was a model, just a whore, and then an artist."

— from Surveys by Natasha Stagg

"This is all anyone needs to know, finally -- if you can resign yourself to losing, you may win."

Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding

"Whenever I send dirty pictures to my long-distance lover, I always leave them headless. It just seems like a good idea, considering how digital information travels. So these pictures were low-resolution, at an awkward angle, entirely home-made – and for this reason very sexy, if I say so myself."

-Barbara Browning, The Correspondence Artist

"I don’t want to be miserable, but I also want to embrace the fucked-up, to move towards a maturity and strength that can include and express weakness and embarrassing content of all sorts without shame, to allow myself the full resonance of being a female subject (and all the other categorical adjectives that could be applied to me) living in a fucked up nation, in a fucked up world, in the 21st century."

-Dodie Bellamy, the buddhist