1. “Sometimes I wish I had not woken up from a beautiful dream, because sometimes waking up is more frightening than a nightmare.”
After absorbing the tragic irony that the Electoral College was originally created to prevent tyranny, Sophie found solace in this quote from surrealist painter Danny Sillada, which she puffy painted on her favorite Minnie Mouse sweatshirt.
2. “Life’s so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.”
On the day Philando Castile’s killer was acquitted, Sophie furiously scrawled these words from Alan Moore’s Watchmen in her friend’s pop-up birthday card.
3. “Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.”
After her social studies teacher casually remarked that Confederate statues don’t glorify a system of white supremacy, but simply represent a strong interest in “heritage,” Sophie rage-doodled this melancholic Gorgias quote across her Sparkle Mermaid binder.
4. “In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he creates a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness.”
Upon learning that Louis C.K. received a standing ovation during his first performance after being disgraced by the #MeToo movement, Sophie achieved catharsis by repeatedly drawing and shake-erasing these words from Jean-Paul Sartre on her Etch-a-Sketch.
5. “There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there?”
When Greg Gianforte won his Congressional race despite literally body slamming a reporter the day before, Sophie embroidered these words from Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran over her “Roller Coaster Design Challenge” Girl Scout badge.
6. “Everything in the world displeases me: but, above all, my displeasure in everything displeases me.”
After learning that Jared Kushner got into Harvard because his dad donated $2.5 million, and yet he opposes affirmative action, Sophie used these dysphoric words from Nietzsche to respond when the lunch lady asked, “Fish sticks or pizza?”
7. “Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.”
After the Supreme Court decided in favor of the homophobic Colorado baker, Sophie was inspired by this Umberto Eco quote to ironically run for student government on a platform of disillusionment and fire drills that literally never end.
