You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.”
— Pema Chödrön (via swissmiss)
Tag: Quote
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”
— Isaiah 5:20 (via @middlechurch)
Your own positive future begins in this moment. All you have is right now. Every goal is possible from here.”
— Lao Tzu (via WeCroak)
I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.”
— Arthur C. Clarke (via Dense Discovery)
I write because…well, the best I can say for it is it’s a psychological quark of mine developed in response to whatever personal failings I have.”
— Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays
[S]haming has social meaning. It characteristically results in a desire to sever the sightlines between the self and the other. We talk about wanting to hide our faces and the characteristic look of shame—the head bowed, the eyes lowered. But that’s not the only way of achieving such separation. Rather than hide, one can instead do away with the onlooker. ‘He who is ashamed would like to force the world not to look at him, not to notice his exposure. He would like to destroy the eyes of the world,’ as Erik Erikson famously put it (1963, 227).
— Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny
Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience—mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious—rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance””
— Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays
I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.”
— James Baldwin
