Califia Quotes & Sayings

If your relationship with someone is based on your desire for them to change into something radically different, there's no real closeness there, no real communication. — Patrick Califia

My life is a tree, yoke fellow of the earth, pledged by roots too deep for remembrance. To stand hard against the storm. To fill my place. (But high in the branches of my green tree there is a wild bird singing. Wing-free are the wings of my bird; she hath built no mortal nest) — Karle Wilson Baker

When it comes to your inner critic, my advice is to not take advice from someone who doesn't like you. That's like returning to the perpetrator for healing after you've been abused. — Patrick Califia

As an activist, you gotta pick something that's particularly interesting to you and go for it - because there's no shortage of things to do. And it's sort of a long-term commitment. Activism is for life. — Patrick Califia

There seems to be a psychological law of inertia that bogs down every hopeful activist and subverts every revolution. When compassion and empathy fail, backsliding begins. Or totalitarianism. — Patrick Califia-Rice

Gay male and lesbian culture is obsessed with purity of identity as the only basis for figuring out who you can trust or dance with. -Pat Califia — Carol Queen

We are a motley bunch. But we more than make up for it with tenacity." ~ Ralston to Simon — Sarah MacLean

Marriage is based on a more enduring kind of love. — Kate Atkinson

Most of us made a rather extensive study of heterosexuality before leaving it behind. -Pat Califia — Carol Queen

Crowns are hourly tumbling. — A.H. Septimius

When you're hurting another person, past a certain point you're cracking them open and whatever's inside them gets all over you. So you should kinda check out whether you want that to happen. — Patrick Califia

A lot of people who are depressed, I think, are suffering from blocked creativity. — Patrick Califia

Responsibility without power is a really bad deal. — Patrick Califia

Hope is a critical thing. Whithout it, we are nothing. Hope shapes will. The will shapes the world. — Karen Marie Moning

Leaders when not leading are outcasts. — Harold Klemp

Insisting on maintaining dignity at all costs is paralyzing. Mistakes are informative, and so is playing the fool — Patrick Califia-Rice

SM is an art. Doing it well requires more than a bag full of expensive whips and exotic electrical toys, a closet full of fetish clothes, or a basement filled with bondage furniture. — Patrick Califia-Rice

I'm very fond of the concept of choice as the basis for sexual preference. This point of view is unpopular in an era in which every claim for gay rights is bases on pseudoscientific sulking about how we can't help being queer; we're just born that way. Thanks, but I don't want to receive my civil rights as a charity fuck bequeathed on me by my genetic superiors. — Patrick Califia-Rice

She appreciated the fact that the wolf did not caper, bow down, yelp, or slaver on her, in the slavish and inconsiderate way of dogs. The wolf was no whore for man's approval. He fed himself. — Patrick Califia-Rice

We're on the verge of all things new. — Billy Joel

By coming out to ourselves, we free up the energy we spent keeping a part of ourselves hidden. — Patrick Califia

There was one rumor that "Susie Bright" and sex theorist "Pat Califia" were one and the same, and that this individual was not actually a woman at all but a pimp hired by an entity composed of the Mitchell Brothers and a Japanese porn syndicate, which was selling women as sex slaves overseas. — Susie Bright

If a young person is surviving by trading sex for the thing they need, what useful purpose is served by criminalizing that activity? Doesn't everybody have the right to try and survive? it might cost more to create shelters or group homes, drug treatment programs, schools for emancipated minors, counseling services, medical care and job training. But such programs can salvage human lives that are otherwise going to be cut short or wasted.
If we can afford massive kiddy porn stings, why can't we afford to do this? Is it because, as a society,we obtain more pleasure out of trying to control young people, and punishing the minors who escape our control, than we would out of taking good care of kids who are in trouble? — Patrick Califia-Rice

I feel more strongly with every recurring year that our country has no tradition which does it so much honour and which it should guard so jealously as that of its hospitality. It is a tradition that is unique as far as my experience goes (and I have visited not a few places abroad) among the modern nations. Some would say, perhaps, that with us it is rather a failing than anything to be boasted of. But granted even that, it is, to my mind, a princely failing, and one that I trust will long be cultivated among us. Of one thing, at least, I am sure. As long as this one roof shelters the good ladies aforesaid- and I wish from my heart it may do so for many and many a long year to come- the tradition of genuine warm-hearted courteous Irish hospitality, which our forefathers have handed down to us and which we must hand down to our descendants, is still alive among us. — James Joyce

Do the most difficult thing if that is what will pay you. Dust the Rust if you Must. Success never comes with ease. — Israelmore Ayivor

If you live in a society that wishes you didn't exist, anything you do to make yourself happy disrupts its attempts to wipe you out, or at the very least, make you invisible. — Patrick Califia-Rice

Except in very narrow cases, where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you're toast anyway. — Eric Ries

I think we are doing poor sex education if we don't look at how erotic behavior actually takes place, and offer people interventions that are reasonable. - Pat Califia — Tristan Taormino

S/M flies in the face of every attempt the state makes to appropriate our bodies, our labor, our time, and our imaginations. ... the state is deeply offended by any group of people who say, 'My body doesn't belong to you, it belongs to me, so fuck off' ... — Patrick Califia-Rice

Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom. — Patrick Califia-Rice

Prejudice usually can't survive close contact with the people who are supposed to be so despicable, which is why the propagandists for hate always preach separation. — Patrick Califia

I love staring out toward the ocean and away from anything manmade. — Francis Chan

This is one of the reasons we need to transition: people can't validate an identity they can't see. — Patrick Califia

It should not be a crime to discuss any idea, however outrageous — Patrick Califia-Rice

I was living near the Twin Towers on 9/11, so I saw the attacks, and I had friends who were killed in the attacks. — Anand Gopal

The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding. — Immanuel Kant

Sex discrimination and hate crimes against women don't come from the leather community or its pornography. They occur within contexts like industrial capitalism and marriage that most people take for granted as if they had always existed, like gravity or continental drift. If feminism is going to change the world, it has to focus its critical lens on what most people think is normal, not on what most people think is abnormal. — Patrick Califia-Rice

My body has become
another country
and I feel like an unemployed
illegal alien
how will I survive
where I do not belong
I belong with you — Patrick Califia-Rice

The scars are a way of reminding me that the past is real. They are honorable. — Patrick Califia

Boy lovers and the lesbians who have young lovers ... are not child molesters. The child abusers are priests, teachers, therapists, cops and parents who force their staid morality onto the young people in their custody. — Patrick Califia