- “In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to, in turn, feel the need to be constantly visible, for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success. Do not be afraid to disappear, from it, from us, and see what comes to you in the silence.” — Michaela Coel
- “It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world.” —Mary Oliver
- "I am a flawed experimenting person so I will need a husband with a more forgiving disposition." AND "In some ways it would be a relief to be rid of my questing self." --Poor Things
- "People want to love you. You should let them." - American Fiction
- "Let's adore one another before there is no more of you and me." -Rumi
- "There are the values we call power and privilege or fame and fortune. Those are the earthly values. And then there’s truth and justice, and they always clash. The more you’re successful at achieving fame and fortune the less you will have truth and justice––and the more you fight for truth and justice the less power and privilege, like Christ, Socrates, Martin Luther King. I understood that if I pursued the path of truth and justice it would come at a severe price in my earthly existence. My kingdom is not of this world. I do not expect reward in an earthly world. My reward is in my soul." —Norman Finkelstein
- “Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind. In this sense the most insignificant writer can serve peace, where the most powerful tribunals can do nothing.” --Julien Benda
- “Some people think God created the universe. Some people think Nothing created the universe. Some people say God doesn't exist but you know what definitely doesn't exist. Nothing. So either you think it's God: something you can't taste, touch, photograph, or prove. Or Nothing: Something you can taste, touch, photograph, or prove. But I think we can all agree that if your NOTHING spontaneously erupts into EVERYTHING then that's a pretty damn magical Nothing. What happens when you die? You go back into nothing. You merge back with the creator." --Pete Homes
- “We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” --Charles Bukowski
- There are no demons. Just men. --Fargo
- “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.” --Leonard Bernstein
- "I think hell’s something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go. They’re doing the same things they always did. They’re doing it to themselves. That’s hell.” --Neil Gaiman
- "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." --Eisenhower
- "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." --Soren Kierkegaard
- "You must survive your thoughts."
- “We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.” - Virginia Woolf
- "I made you this bright so others would see in the darkness." "I won’t let anyone be the gatekeeper of my dreams." --Sex Education
- Years of love have been forgotten in the hatred of a minute. - Edgar A. Poe
- "At that time, the cage of my circumstance, in my mind, was my gender. Not its actuality — I liked my body well enough. What I didn't like was what I thought it signified: that I was tied to my "nature," to my animal body-to the whole simian realm of instinct-and far more elementally so than, say, my brothers. I had "cycles." They did not. I was to pay attention to "clocks." They needn't. There were special words for me, lurking on the horizon, prepackaged to mark the possible future stages of my existence. I might become a spinster. I might become a crone. I might be a babe or a MILF or "childless." My brothers, no matter what else might befall them, would remain men. And in the end of it all, if I was lucky, I would become that most piteous of things, an old lady, whom I already understood was a figure everybody felt free to patronize, even children." _ Zadie Smith
- “If they think things are more important than people, and they do, let them think so. Let them be destroyed by their things.” — Baldwin
- "His sense of living disappeared. So sometimes, the “normal” people is more easy to adapt to the reality which fills with not ideal situation and needs compromise. That’s the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to everyone of us." --Hua Hsu, Stay True
- "It's a negligence if people don't take the time to honor the things that they take delight in, but more importantly, that they share the things that they take delight in. And if you don't do that, there's a loss there. You have to do it to achieve humanity. You have to share delight." --Ross Gay, Book of Delights
- It's so painful wanting something and not wanting it at the same time. --Scenes from a Marriage
- “I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return.” --Frida Kahlo
- “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.” --DH Lawrence
- Everybody is a wonderin' what and where they all came from. Everybody is a worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done. But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me. I think I'll just let the mystery be. --Iris DeMent
- “We are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts.” --Don Delillo
- "The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don't know what's going on. There is always something to love." --Everything Everywhere All At Once
- "Everyone is great, everyone is terrible, and everyone is flawed, and there are no exceptions to that." --Fleishman Is in Trouble
- "Spouses do chop each other into pieces, fashion new forms and uses for each other."
- "It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you know despair or can see it in others." --David Whyte
- I will not be responsible for the version of me you created in your head.
- To be a woman who wants to exist outside capitalist beauty standards, the dated institution of contractual marriage, and the biological expectation of reproduction, you have to be just a little bit crazy.
- The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. --Audre Lorde
- Love is an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor. --Crying in H Mart
- “Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism.Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists, who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.”
- When you’re accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression.
- To err is human. To forgive is divine.
- The cells you were born with have been replaced over and over again by newer and newer ones throughout your entire life. In other words, we're all living in new bodies different from the ones we were born into. Tully asks Marlo if she thinks that makes us the same person as when we were born, or a different one. Marlo chooses the latter, saying that we are no more that person, nor will we be the person we are now in five, 10, or 50 years. --Tully
- People cling to their hate so stubbornly because they sense once hate is gone they'll be forced to deal with pain. --Baldwin
- I’ve been fortunate and helped to put myself in a position where I can keep part of my life as child-like. But I run the whole thing. I don’t have anyone looking after me. I don’t even think it’s child-like. I’m horribly aware of the pitfalls of life and the meanness of people. I don’t have that child-like naivety anymore. BUT I’m determined to not be ground down by the notion of adult life which I’ve never subscribed to and never will. I can do all the things I do and make all the decisions I make and still retain that part of me and protect that part of me. And people say you’re able to because you don’t have to work but I always dispute that. I love what I do but it’s still quite hard. I don’t have to work on something for twenty hours. No one is telling me to do anything. There’s no one forcing me to clock on. But at the same time I do work. Everyone around me and the people that I get on with really have that same kind of sense of wonder. There is difference between child-like and childish. I’m only ever moved to write words from extremes of emotion and that is a child-like quality and that is ground down in people unless something really tragic happens and then people are kind of moved to tears for a day but then they sink back into their state of being which I have resisted and I would hate if I was no longer moved to feel. My work is founded on my ability to feel. --Robert Smith
- The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives. --A Maupin
- Let me not die while I am still alive...
- David Foster Wallace’s short story “My Appearance,” an actress is coached on how to succeed on Late Night: “Laugh in a way that’s somehow deadpan. Act as if you knew from birth that everything is clichéd and hyped and empty and absurd, and that’s just where the fun is.”
- “La tristesse durera toujours,” which means “the sadness will last forever.” -- Vincent Van Gogh
- The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. --Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” -- Albert Camus
- Happiness would be very nice but not for us. --Beckett
- “I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.” --Simone de Beauvoir
- "The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. --Oscar Wilde
- “And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”― Raymond Carver
- "Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand them." --Doestoevsky
- Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do." --Voltaire
- "One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not, we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs or seem to seek them, who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic, and above all survivors, we're not that way from perversity. And we cannot just relax and let it go. We've learned to cope in ways you never had to." --Piers Anthony
- "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." --Eleanor Roosevelt
- You live in the subjective truth...everyone has the right to their truth...
- Intelligence is not thinking you know everything but questioning everything you know...
- "I wish you could live in my brain for a week. It's washed with the most violent waves of emotion." --Virginia Woolf
- “I must learn to love the fool in me--the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of my human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my Fool.” --Theodore Isaac Rubin
- "Our true life is lived in our imagination and in the memory." --Wilder
- "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." T. Roosevelt
- Allow yourself to feel deeply enough to be transformed.
- Our lives are defined by opportunities. Even the ones we miss. --Fitzgerald.
- “The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim. Even for those thousands of young people who don’t get something out there, the process is still a noble one — the process of trying to say something, of working through craft issues and the worldview issues and the ego issues — all of this is character-building, and, God forbid, everything we do should have concrete career results. I’ve seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.” --George Saunders
- Everyone knows the same truth.' Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it. One person will distort it with a kind of wishful thinking like religion, someone else will distort it by thinking political solutions are going to do something, someone else will think a life of sensuality is going to do it, someone else will think art transcends. Art for me has always been the Catholicism of the intellectuals. There is no afterlife for the Catholics really, and there's no afterlife for the arts. 'Your painting lived on after you' - well, that doesn't really do it. That's not what you want. Even if your painting does have some longevity, eventually that's going to go. There won't be any works of William Shakespeare or Ludwig van Beethoven, or any theatre to see them in, or air or light. I've always felt you've got to live your life within the context of this worst-case scenario. Which is true; the worst-case scenario is here. --Woody Allen
- “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others” --Martha Graham
- “Well I know this, and anyone who has ever tried to live knows this. What you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessities, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you, I’m describing me." --James Baldwin
- “Love? What is it? Most natural pain killer what there is. LOVE” --William S. Burroughs’ Last Words
- There are no new waves. There is only the ocean. --Godard
- "I don't know anything about love. To me it's just some crazy feeling like your lungs pulling away from each other and then, later, a calm loyalty between friends that nurtures and sustains." --Stephen Elliott
- “The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.” ― Jim Morrison
- "After living in the dark for so long, a glimpse of the light can make you giddy. Strange thoughts come into your head and you better think'em. Has a special fate been calling you and you not listening? Is there a secret message right in front of you and you're not reading it? Is this your last, best chance? Are you gonna take it? Or are you going to the grave with unlived lives in your veins?" --Good Girl Film
- “If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” --Van Gogh
- "Find out how much God has given you and from it take what you need; the remainder is needed by others." --Saint Augustine
- "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." --Edmund Burke
- "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars." --Jack Kerouac
- I think you have given your "alarmists" a bad name. Surely there is very real and very convincing data that the planet cannot survive the excesses of the human race: proliferation of atomic devices, uncontrolled breeding habits, the rape of the environment, the pollution of land, sea, and air. In this context, isn't it obvious that "Chicken Little" represents the sane vision and that Homo Sapiens' motto, "Let's go shopping!" is the cry of the true lunatic?" --12 Monkeys
- "I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning." --Stevie Smith
- “It's easier to die when you have lived than it is to die when you haven't. So I say to all young people, go make memories, beautiful memories. When the time comes for you to go you will not go alone.” --Doc Paskowitz
- "I've been working since I was ten. I want to know why I'm working, The answer can't just be to pay bills and pile up more money. I want to know where I stand, where I fit into the picture, what it's all going to mean and you can't find that out sitting behind some desk in an office. Well as soon as I get enough money together I'm going to knock off for a while -- quit. I want to save part of my life for myself. There's a catch to it, though: It's got to be part of the young part. You know: retire young, work old -- come back and work when I know what I'm working for. Does that make sense to you?" --Cary Grant, holiday
- “The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.” --Henry Miller
- "A soul mate sometimes enters our life as someone to stir us up. To hold up the mirror so that we can see ourselves more clearly and antagonize us and make us so uncomfortable that we have to change because we can't continue to look at the same thing because we're looking at it clearly now. This is the reason a soul mate may not last forever. The encounter is so intense and so clarifying that we burn through those things quickly." --Elizabeth Gilbert
- "We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.", “One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.”, “Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed”, “Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.” --Henry Miller
- It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. --Marcel Proust
- Humility is the sign of a quality education both institutionally and in life, lending itself to a quiet wisdom, rather than boastful knowledge. --UC Berkeley professor
- It doesn't matter how many people say it cannot be done or how many people have done it before; it's only important that you are doing it, and for that reason it is special.
- Those who love you when you need them. That's your family.
- Teddy told me that in Greek nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and around and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.” --Don Draper, Mad Men
- "I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be." — Albert Einstein
- "I have broken your mind to pieces. I want to make it whole. I want you to feel a wholeness and harmony such as I have never allowed you to feel before." --Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut jr.
- "Camus says that there are thousands of people moving about around us that are carrying their own corpses" --Thich Nhat Hanh
- "The photograph is such a puny shield against time, against the power of forgetting which is bigger than all of us, a monster that has put entire civilizations beyond memory. And it will eventually consume everything we know too. The only question is, when? Is it going be a hundred years from now that nobody remembers anything of what we are, or two hundred? We are not going to get around this no matter how many pictures we take." --Ira Glass, This American Life
- Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating...they live the poetry they cannot write." -Oscar Wilde
- "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." - Dr. Mark Vonnegut
- I hope that when the world comes to an end, I can breathe a sigh of relief, because there will be so much to look forward to. --Donnie Darko
- "I must find a truth that is true for me . . . the idea for which I can live or die." --Kierkegaard
- "I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good thing,
therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any fellow human
being let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not
pass this way again."
- "Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other---that kept me going." -Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary
- There's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life... You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry... you will someday." --American Beauty
- "There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite the word, because sketch means an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture." --Kundera
- I promise not to leave you, But no one should promise that, So I'll just say I love you as many days as I can. --Trembling Blue Stars
- People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television. --Warhol
- We are acutely aware our differences before our similarities.
- Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity. --Thomas Hardy
- It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. --Thomas Hardy
- "We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." --Carl Sagan
- "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." Grandi
- "True friends stab you in the front." --Oscar Wilde
- "Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure..." Nelson Mandela
- "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." --Oscar Wilde
- "The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself."
- "It is not enough to confess your sins, you have to change your direction" --Gore Vidal
- "Partying for me is sitting in a corner of a party and quietly judging people" --comedian
- “Remember, to be radical is simply to grasp the root of a problem" --Howard Zinn
- "...when i use the word god, i am so aware that i am using a code word, everyone imagines something different. my own idea of god, as imperfect and as evolving as it is, would be the glue that connects everything together...the consciousness that moves between all living things. when i use the word god, i do not envision a large person with two arms or two legs etc, i envision instead some presence so beyond my being, a presence that both knows the stars by name and knows me by name, that is not here to be useful to me, that is not here to give me things as much as to ask me *to give myself away for love* when i say i believe in god, i mean i trust in the goodness of life, and of being, and i trust that beyond all reason and i trust that with my life." --Barbara Brown
- "The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen." — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
- He was the future he was a perfect picture of the future and they were afraid to let anyone see what the future was like. Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future and somewhere in the future they saw war. To fight that war they would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn't fight. So they were masking the future they were keeping the future a soft quiet deadly secret. They knew that if all the little people all the little guys saw the future they would begin to ask questions. They would ask questions and they would find answers and they would say to the guys who wanted them to fight they would say you lying thieving sons-of-bitches we won't fight we won't be dead we will live we are the world we are the future and we will not let you butcher us no matter what you say no matter what speeches you make no matter what slogans you write. Remember it well we we we are the world we are what makes it go round we make bread and cloth and guns we are the hub of the wheel and the spokes and the wheel itself without us you would be hungry naked worms and we will not die. We are immortal we are the sources of life we are the lowly despicable ugly people we are the great wonderful beautiful people of the world and we are sick of it we are utterly weary we are done with it forever and ever because we are the living and we will not be destroyed. If you make a war if there are guns to be aimed if there are bullets to be fired if there are men to be killed they will not be us. They will not be us the guys who grow wheat and turn it into food the guys who make clothes and paper and houses and tiles the guys who build dams and power plants and string the long moaning high tension wires the guys who crack crude oil down into a dozen different parts who make light globes and sewing machines and shovels and automobiles and airplanes and tanks and guns oh no it will not be us who die. It will be you. It will be you-you who urge us on to battle you who incite us against ourselves you who would have one cobbler kill another cobbler you who would have one man who works kill another man who works you who would have one human being who wants only to live kill another human being who wants only to live. Remember this. Remember this well you people who plan for war. Remember this you patriots you fierce ones you spawners of hate you inventors of slogans. Remember this as you have never remembered anything else in your lives. We are men of peace we are men who work and we want no quarrel. But if you destroy our peace if you take away our work if you try to range us one against the other we will know what to do. If you tell us to make the world safe for democracy we will take you seriously and by god and by Christ we will make it so. We will use the guns you force upon us we will use them to defend our very lives and the menace to our lives does not lie on the other side of a nomansland that was set apart without our consent it lies within our own boundaries here and now we have seen it and we know it. Put the guns into our hands and we will use them. Give us the slogans and we will turn them into realities. Sing the battle hymns and we will take them up where you left off. Not one not ten not ten thousand not a million not ten millions not a hundred millions but a billion two billions of us all the people of the world we will have the slogans and we will have the hymns and we will have the guns and we will use them and we will live. Make no mistake of it we will live. We will be alive and we will walk and talk and eat and sing and laugh and feel and love and bear our children in tranquillity in security in decency in peace. You plan the wars you masters of men plan the wars and point the way and we will point the gun. --Trumbo
- Envy is the central fact of American life. + Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little. -Gore Vidal
- “If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.” -Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited, 1945)
- “Isn’t it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture—From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: “Be yourself.” “Follow your heart.” Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? Is Kitsey right? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on “the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement, the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or—like Boris—is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?” --The Goldfinch
- The scariest thought in the world is that someday I'll wake up and realize I've been sleepwalking through my life: underappreciating the people I love, making the same hurtful mistakes over and over, a slave to neuroses, fear, and the habitual. --George Saunders
- I still believe that capitalism is too harsh and I believe that, even within that, there is a lot of satisfaction and beauty if you happen to be one of the lucky ones, although that doesn't eradicate the reality of the suffering. It's all true at once, kind of humming and sublime. --George Saunders
- We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity. --Karen Armstrong
- “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.” --Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to "get through it," rise to the occasion, exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves the for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief was we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” --Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
- “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.” --David Foster Wallace
- “She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” --Toni Morrison
sep 6 2008 ∞
apr 14 2024 +