Words & Solace

I read a lot and unsurprisingly, I often find quotes that I adore. I hope you will find them funny or enlightening or beautiful as well. I recommend all the books and authors I quote from. Seriously. Read to your heart's content. Shit be good. My personal tumblr is sycophania.

[alcoholiques]

When you have been a refugee, abandoned all your loves and belongings, your memories become your belongings. Images of the past, snippets of old conversations, furnish the world within your mind. When you have nothing left to guard, you guard your memories. You guard them with silence.

Roya Hakakian, Journey from the Land of No

[alcoholiques]

If there is to be one word that defines the fragility, the vulnerability but also the invincibility of the human condition, it is memory... To remember is to acknowledge the postulate that time does leave traces and scars on the surface of history, that all events are intertwined, all gates open to the same truth.

Elie Wiesel

[alcoholiques]

War involves the destruction of people and their worlds. It involves laying waste life and property. And when the war is over its legacies live on in personal memories, bodily scars and destroyed cultural landscapes. People and landscapes remain contaminated by war for the long term.

Michael Humphrey

[alcoholiques]

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

Elie Wiesel

[alcoholiques]

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

Eric Hoffer, "The Passionate State of Mind"

[alcoholiques]

Although language can be a prison that confines us, we have the potential to push back the walls and bars as we master more words.

Symbolic Interactionism of George Herbert Mead

[staleofftheboat]

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: ‘Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe,’ in literal translation, ‘God gives but doesn’t share.’ This meant, as Farmer would later explain it, ‘God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he’s not the one who’s supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.’

Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains (via sycophania)

[alcoholiques]

Be more concerned with character than reputation. Character is what you are, reputation is what people think you are.

John Wooden

[alcoholiques]

Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.

C. Wright Mills

[alcoholiques]

We do not suffer by accident.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

[alcoholiques]

There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

[alcoholiques]

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

[alcoholiques]

There is always the risk: something is good and good and good and good, and then all at once it gets awkward. All at once, she seeks you looking at her, and then she doesn't want to joke around with you anymore, because she doesn't want to seem flirty, because she doesn't want you to think she likes you. It's such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away at the wall of separation between friendship and kissing. Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have a happy middle--oh, look, we broke down this wall, I'm going to look at you like a girl and you're going to look at me like a boy and we're going to play a fun game called Can I Put My Hand There What About There What About There. And sometimes that happy middle looks so great that you can convince yourself that it's not the middle but will last forever.

John Green, A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle (Let It Snow)

[alcoholiques]

I felt so alone on that train...a weird, unnatural kind of alone that bore into me. It was feeling just beyond fear and somewhere to the left of sadness. Tired, but not the kind of tired that sleep fixes.

Maureen Johnson, The Jubilee Express (Let It Snow)

[alcoholiques]

'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.'

John Green, Looking for Alaska

[alcoholiques]

If a woman doesn't renounce herself in favor of the male, she is selfish. If a woman remains a virgen until she marries, she is a good woman. For a woman of my culture there used to be only three directions she could turn: to the Church as a nun, to the streets as a prostitute, or to the home as a mother. Today some of us have a fourth choice: entering the world by way of education and career and becoming self-autonomous persons. A very few of us.

Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands

[alcoholiques]

'It is a law that parents should not have to bury their children,' he said. 'And someone should enforce it.'

John Green, Looking for Alaska