I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe
Tag: Quote
-
Touch Nature
“Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea. Entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again.”
— Carl Jung (via swissmiss)
-
The Clock is Ticking
“You have to cherish things in a different way when you know the clock is ticking, you are under pressure.”
— Chadwick Boseman
-
The Quintessential Figure
Eve not only deserves punishment but becomes the quintessential figure of unruly, transgressive nature, a nature that neither woman nor man can altogether contain and both would prefer to repudiate.”
— Lisa Appignanesi, Introduction to The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
-
Even in Me
“We are all such as He was—the inheritors of sin; we must all bear and bear and expiate a past which is not ours; there is in all of us—ay, even in me—a sparkle of the divine.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla
-
The Work is an End
If you can work in such a way that the process will be pleasurable enough that even if nothing comes of it, the work is an end in and of itself—then you’ll be ok. It’s not a means to an end, the work is an end.”
— Jia Tolentino, On writing for the sake of writing
-
Sad and Noble Truth
“[The crucifix] stood there, crowning the rock, as it still stands on so many highway sides, vainly preaching to passers-by, an emblem of sad and noble truths: that pleasure is not an end, but an accident; that pain is the choice of the magnanimous; that it is best to suffer all things and do well.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla
-
Creation and Recreation
Never before had I so realized the miracle of the continued race, the creation and recreation, the weaving and changing and handing down a fleshly elements. That a child should be born of its mother, that it should grow and clothe itself (we know not how) with humanity, and put on inherited looks, and turn its head with the manner of one ascendant, and offer its hand with a gesture of another, are wonders dulled for us by repetition.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla
-
Don’t Complain
Sister, there are people who went to sleep all over the world last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. Sister, those who expected to rise did not, their beds became their cooling boards, and their blankets became their winding sheets. And those dead folks would give anything, anything at all, for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of that plowing that person was grumbling about. So you watch yourself about complaining, Sister. What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.”
— Maya Angelou (via swissmiss)
-
All the Filth
“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”
— James Baldwin, Collected Essays
-
Intangible Dreams
Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
-
The Way of Love
During the ’60s, the great majority of us accepted the way of peace, the way of love, the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living. There’s something cleansing, something wholesome about being peaceful and orderly, to stand up with a sense of dignity, and a sense of pride, and never hate. And Dr. King said over and over again, ‘Hate is too heavy a burden to bear.’ The way of love is a much better way.
And that’s what we did…Yes, I was beaten, left bloody and unconscious. But I never became bitter or hostile, never gave up. I believe that somehow and some way if it becomes necessary to use our bodies to help redeem the soul of a nation, then we must do it. Create a society at peace with itself, and lay down the burden of hate and division. Dr. King would say, violence and evil, it must stop someplace along the way, and we became disciples of the movement. Disciples of Martin Luther King, Jr., and of the great teacher, to do what we could to leave our society better than we found it.”
— Rep. John Lewis
Lisa Marie Blair 