bell hooks December 11, 2024 #quotes "There remains a small strain of feminist thinkers who feel strongly that they have given all they want to give to men; they are concerned solely with improving the collective welfare of women. Yet life has shown me that any time ..." [expand] Henry David Thoreau December 7, 2024 #quotes "We find only the world we look for." James Baldin October 23, 2024 #quotes "Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all." Susan Sontag October 23, 2024 #quotes “I am hooked on talk as a creative dialogue ... For me, it’s the principal medium of my salvation." Anaïs Nin October 23, 2024 #quotes "Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feels as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic." Samuel Delany October 23, 2024 #quotes "Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn't." James Baldwin October 22, 2024 #quotes "All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up." Amiri Baraka October 22, 2024 #quotes "The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world and themselves more completely. That's how I see it. Otherwise, I don't know why you do it." George Orwell October 15, 2024 #quotes "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." Margaret Atwood October 15, 2024 #quotes "Electricity can light your lamp or it can burn down your house; and so it is with human power." Ezra Klein October 3, 2024 #quotes "In dark times when so much in the news is so unrelentingly horrible, it is a political act ... to open yourself to the awe and joy and beauty the world still provides. To sit with a poem or take a walk in the woods isn't an abdication..." [expand] Kerry Howley September 6, 2024 #quotes "A person you cannot imagine is a person whose safety you will treat with a certain lightness." Toni Morrison September 6, 2024 #quotes "Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous." Alice Walker August 25, 2024 #quotes "I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." Antonio Gramsci August 25, 2024 #quotes "The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned." Margaret Renkl August 24, 2024 #quotes "If there is any truth more fundamental than the human need to be chosen, surely it is the abiding suspicion that we don't deserve to be chosen." W.E.B. Du Bois August 24, 2024 #quotes "I regarded it as axiomatic that the world wanted to learn the truth and if the truth was sought with even approximate accuracy and painstaking devotion, the world would gladly support the effort." Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (movie) August 24, 2024 #quotes "Desires are never mundane." Henry David Thoreau August 24, 2024 #quotes "All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers, or backgammon, a playing with right and wrong; its obligation never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority." Fyodor Dostoyevsky August 21, 2024 #quotes "Do you know that I love now to recall and visit at certain dates the places where I was once happy in my own way? I love to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past, and I often wander like a shadow, aimless..." [expand] Jennifer Egan August 21, 2024 #quotes "...Quantifiability doesn't make human life any less remarkable, or even (this is counterintuitive, I know) less mysterious." Marcel Proust August 21, 2024 #quotes "The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish." W. Edwards Deming August 15, 2024 #quotes "A bad system will beat a good person every time." Esther Yi August 12, 2024 #quotes "True, thousands of kilometers may have been closed between you and him, but keep thinking with a measuring stick and you'll reduce yourself to an asymptote." Deena Shanker August 12, 2024 #quotes "If you want people to eat something, show them it's delicious." Joan Didion July 18, 2024 #quotes “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference…” [see more] Jacqueline Harpman July 16, 2024 #quotes “Perhaps, when someone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness. That is something that I, who have only experienced absurdity, can only suppose.” Marcus Aurelius July 15, 2024 #quotes “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.” Joan Didion July 12, 2024 #quotes “Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.” Albert Einstein July 12, 2024 #quotes "For all of us who are concerned for peace and the triumph of reason and justice must today be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field … yet we may rest assured that without the tireless efforts if those who are concerned with the welfare of humanity as a whole…" [expand] Sylvia Plath July 12, 2024 #quotes “Even the apostles were tentmakers. We all have to make a living.” Norman Mailer July 11, 2024 #quotes “The slow twists and turns of one's creative impulse can be a form of protecting oneself from the driving force, which sometimes is manic.” Esther Yi July 11, 2024 #quotes “God was unexpectedly gripped by ambition. God wasn't content to limit himself to the material usually reserved for the creation of a single person. So he reached for another pile…” [expand] Ottessa Moshfegh July 11, 2024 #quotes “Education is directly proportional to anxiety, as you’ve probably learned.” Mary Oliver July 11, 2024 #quotes “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” Raphael Warnock July 11, 2024 #quotes “When you're accustomed to privilege, parity and equity and equality may feel like oppression.” Joan Didion July 11, 2024 #quotes “Did he know I was writing it? He edited it.” Lemony Snicket July 11, 2024 #quotes “Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they've been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative." Esther Yi July 9, 2024 #quotes “‘I'd kill to feel what you're feeling,’ the Music Professor said, laying her head back on a hand. ‘That doorway feeling. To be on the cusp of experience. I'd kill to know it again.’" Anne Carson July 3, 2024 #quotes “I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.” Mary Oliver July 2, 2024 #quotes “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” Ta-Nehisi Coates June 27, 2024 #quotes “You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.” Cole Arthur Riley June 27, 2024 #quotes “You will not survive by self care and self-love alone. Who will hold you? Who will remember you? You, who are something to behold. You, who are flawed and mysterious and needy and good.” Alice Walker June 27, 2024 #quotes “When I consider that he is, they are, a real and present threat to my life and the life of my daughter, my people, I think—in perfect harmony with my sister of long ago: Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything.” Richard Selzer June 27, 2024 #quotes “For the first time we can see into the cavity of the abdomen. Such a primitive place. One expects to find drawings of buffalo on the walls.” James Baldwin June 27, 2024 #quotes “To accept one's past one's history— is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” Alice Walker June 27, 2024 #quotes “Only justice can stop a curse.” Anaïs Nin June 22, 2024 #quotes “For a year, in semisolitude, my imagination has had time to grow beyond measure.” Esther Yi, in Y/N June 20, 2024 #quotes "When you confront him with the full force of who you are, only then will he realize he's been waiting for you. You have to show up and confront him with his destiny in the form of you." Mary Oliver June 20, 2024 #quotes “The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written.” Esther Yi, in Y/N June 20, 2024 #quotes "But the ballet dancers were nothing more than smoothly running machines, noiseless and neoprene." Mary Oliver June 19, 2024 #quotes “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” Robert Southey June 17, 2024 #quotes "It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn." George Orwell June 17, 2024 #quotes “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” Franz Liszt June 12, 2024 #quotes “Publishers have frequently asked me to write memoirs, but I put it off with the excuse that it was more than enough for me to live through my life, without transcribing it to paper.” Robert McNamara June 11, 2024 #quotes "God is clearly democratic. He distributes brainpower universally. But He quite justifiably expects us to do something efficient and constructive with that priceless gift.” Zora Neale Hurston June 11, 2024 #quotes "When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over…” [read more] Simone de Beauvoir June 10, 2024 #quotes "Cowardice doesn’t pay." George Orwell June 9, 2024 #quotes “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Lemony Snicket June 9, 2024 #quotes "Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don't tell them they aren't. Sit with them and have a drink." Charlotte Brontë June 4, 2024 #quotes “He's more myself than I. Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” Kurt Vonnegut May 31, 2024 #quotes “I have this trick for dealing with all my worst memories. I insist that they are plays. The characters are actors. Their speeches and movements are stylized, arch. I am in the presence of art.” Emily Dickinson May 31, 2024 #quotes "A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend.” Michael McLaughlin May 31, 2024 #quotes “Good Latin deserves good English.” Dr. Peter Mere Latham May 30, 2024 #quotes “Surely there is an evil in using language more precise than our knowledge. If this were the place, it would be easy to show that medicine has partaken especially of it. Its language has almost always outrun its knowledge. And the evil has been nothing less than this: our language, by ever persuading us that we are wiser than we are, has wedded up to many a capital error.” Groucho Marx May 30, 2024 #quotes "Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read." Carl Sagan May 26, 2024 #quotes “Every cell of your body is a kind of commune, with once free-living parts all banded together for the common good. And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.” itspresro May 26, 2024 #quotes "Anywhere there’s a trail of money, people are gonna bleed it." Anais Nin May 23, 2024 #quotes “I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife…” [see more] Jennifer Egan May 22, 2024 #quotes "An uncomprehending giggle is a beauty’s most reliable tool for diffusing conflict.” Cindy Gallop May 14, 2024 #quotes “People love advertising in particular, but they hate advertising in general.” Dwight Eisenhower May 14, 2024 #quotes “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present—and is to be gravely regarded.” Claire-Louise Bennett May 13, 2024 #quotes “if he had done the worst possible thing yet still hadn’t managed to get under my skin, what did that mean, what on earth did that mean exactly? I hadn’t so much absolved him as obliterated him. I should have cried perhaps. I ought to have cried really. He’d witnessed me coming apart in reaction to far less serious misdeeds and contraventions—but there isn’t a fail-safe index for these things is there, that reliably instructs us as to what we will thrust a knife through us and what will be water off a duck’s back? I ought to have cried but it’s too late for that and I am quite monstrous and Dale is lost for words.” Emily Dickinson May 11, 2024 #quotes "Best Witchcraft is Geometry” Frida Kahlo May 10, 2024 quotes “There is nothing more precious than laughter and scorn — It is strength to laugh and lose oneself, to be cruel and light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing ‘man’ has.” Howard Thurman May 5, 2024 #quotes “There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. If you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching. And if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born...” [see more] Anaïs Nin May 4, 2024 #quotes “I wish that no one knew me, I would like to live alone and apart. Ah, how I envy the life of those souls who find so much peace, so much sweetness in solitude.” Kurt Vonnegut May 4, 2024 #quotes “Mankind is trying to become something else; it’s experimenting with new ideas all the time. And writers are a means of introducing new ideas into the society.” Emma Goldman May 3, 2024 #quotes “Poor America, of what avail is all her wealth, if the individuals comprising the nation are wretchedly poor?” Jennifer Egan April 29, 2024 #quotes “Fatherless girls may invest the moon with a certain paternal promise.” Virginia Woolf April 20, 2024 #quotes “Let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.  There is nothing ready made for him.  He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.  Probably it will be something laughable.” Carl Sagan April 15, 2024 #quotes “Intellectual capacity is no guarantee against being dead wrong.” Maurice Sendak, in the New Yorker (1993) April 13, 2024 #quotes "I remember my own childhood vividly… I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them." Emily Dickinson April 11, 2024 #quotes "I hope you have been well. I hope your rambles have been sweet and your reveries spacious.” Cole Arthur Riley April 10, 2024 #quotes "The pen changes when it’s writing to someone as opposed to for someone …" Esther Yi April 6, 2024 #quotes “You are the most rewatchable person I know. Something about you is always new.” Carl Sagan April 5, 2024 #quotes “What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” Emma Goldman March 28, 2024 #quotes “The most violent element in society is ignorance.” Virginia Woolf March 27, 2024 #quotes “I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people, I would say, if I knew how to make it sound exalted. Think of things in themselves.” Dwight Eisenhower March 27, 2024 #quotes “No battle was ever won according to plan, but no battle was ever won without one… Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Albert Einstein March 26, 2024 #quotes "I regard it as the chief duty of the State to protect the individual and give him the opportunity to develop into a creative personality." Cole Arthur Riley March 26, 2024 #quotes "I’m writing to you as one who used to lie about having friends on the playground. As one who bent her voice an octave higher so people would think her more charming than sullen. I’m writing to you as the one who was too afraid to leave. Who stayed because the distance to the door was too great without someone to be held by. At the core of me, and I suspect humanity, is a hunger to belong. Or at least the defiant sting of never belonging. You know this haunt, but I wonder if you’ve been able to become honest about it." Edgar Allan Poe March 24, 2024 #quotes "Now, my dear friend--now, for your sins, you are to suffer the infliction of a long gossipping letter." Karl Marx March 18, 2024 #quotes "You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.” Jennifer Egan March 16, 2024 #quotes “If the pain makes thought impossible, focus on navigation.” Esther Yi March 15, 2024 #quotes “Here we have data disguised as philosophy, information disguised as art. We no longer go to church once a week; we attend a stadium concert once a year.” Poor Things March 14, 2024 #quotes “Do not cry into the wound. You’ll kill me faster with sepsis.” Norman Mailer March 13, 2024 #quotes "Definition has a value. If an experience is precise, one can know a little more of what is happening to oneself. It is in those marriages and love affairs which are neither good nor bad, not quite interesting nor altogether awful that anxiety flows like a muddy river.” Richard Selzer March 11, 2024 #quotes “Yes, it is the exact location of the soul I am after. The smell of it is in my nostrils.” [see more] Emma Goldman March 10, 2024 #quotes “It is well to consider that laziness results either from special privileges, or physical and mental abnormalities…” Jennifer Egan March 9, 2024 #quotes “You’re cloaking your lust in logic.” Søren Kiekegaard March 3, 2024 #quotes "And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating as the art of possibility?" Alberto Cairo and Lauren Klein March 3, 2024 #quotes "A reduction in complexity is a reduction in humanity." Dolly Parton March 2, 2024 #quotes "I always say that plastic surgeons are all alike, they’re always making mountains out of molehills.” Ottessa Moshfegh March 2, 2024 #quotes “Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.” Arthur Miller February 27, 2024 #quotes "Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away." Jennifer Egan February 26, 2024 #quotes “‘I'm not sure’ is acceptable only when followed, coyly, by ‘You'll have to convince me.’” Time Magazine February 24, 2024 #quotes "Tempus fugit, assholes." Jennifer Egan February 24, 2024 #quotes “Fatherless girls may invest in the moon with a certain paternal promise.” Barrington Moore Jr. February 14, 2024 #quotes “You may protest in words as much as you like. There is but one condition attached to the freedom we would very much like to encourage: your protests may be as loud as possible as long as they remain ineffective.” [see more] Robert Burton February 10, 2024 #quotes “I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, ‘no better cure than business.’” Octavia Butler February 10, 2024 #quotes "All too often, especially young men, will feel, ‘Oh, if it was me, I would just…’ and they have some simple solution that wouldn’t work at all and would probably get them killed. Because they don’t really understand how serious it is when the whole society is literally arrayed against you and arrayed to really keep you in your place. If you get seriously out of line, they will kill you because they fear you." Jennifer Egan February 8, 2024 #quotes “The goal is to be both irresistible and invisible.” George Orwell February 8, 2024 #quotes “And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.” Gabriel García Márquez February 6, 2024 #quotes "If you don't believe in God, at least be superstitious." Pablo Picasso February 1, 2024 #quotes "Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.” Martha Graham January 28, 2024 #quotes "I think comedy is the most difficult thing in the world, I really do. One can always lament, you know - but to laugh in the face of life, that's very hard." Anaïs Nin January 28, 2024 #quotes “Already I know he cannot conquer me, ever. I keep it a secret from him.” Claire-Louise Bennett January 27, 2024 #quotes “Because as it turns out the inside of my thighs were trembling terribly. If you don’t do much at the time it all goes on afterwards. Of course you join in, of course there is no not doing very much, you can’t switch your body off–how did I not know that? Will I eat something? Cheese on toast maybe? Do you feel awful? Is this terrible? Are you going to cry? Well are you? Or are you going to make yourself cry because you feel you should cry? Was it really awful or was it merely unpleasant? Make up your mind now and stick to it–are you going to get into a state about this or not? And then I get irritated with thinking about it…” John Henry Giles, to House January 26, 2024 #quotes "You got THIS, the thing you think about all the time, thing that keeps you south of normal. Yeah, makes us great, makes us the best. All we miss out on is everything else." Carl Sagan January 24, 2024 #quotes “The simplest one-celled organism is a far more complex machine than the finest pocket watch.” Michelangelo January 23, 2024 #quotes “I shall be home in September… I work harder than anyone who ever lived. I am not well and worn out with this stupendous labor and yet I am patient in order to achieve the desired end.” Oscar Wilde January 22, 2024 #quotes "As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for school-boys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." Franz Kafka January 16, 2024 #quotes “This imperfection is not congenital and therefore so much the more painful to bear." Lynn Nottage, in The Paris Review January 15, 2024 #quotes "Research can be a form of procrastination, but it's the sort that is healthy for my spirit.” Virginia Woolf January 15, 2024 #quotes “And for heaven’s sake, publish nothing until you’re thirty.” Joan Didion January 15, 2024 #quotes "I think we are all well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends." Kurt Vonnegut January 14, 2024 #quotes “The child of suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem, even one in simple algebra.”