Please do not gossip on the stairs.

[starrover]

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

Fernando Pessoa (via flaubrt)

[stckwll]

[wordsnquotes]

Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (via closedforprayer)

[suddenonsetkafka]

Me on a date: So what do you think about Mohandas Gandhi?

Date: You mean MAHATMA Gandhi, the father of the world's largest democracy?

Me, shoving breadsticks into my purse: Sorry, i have to-

Date: I think his image is too deified when in reality he was a racist anti-black Hindu-centric sexist bigot, and his reception by the general public in India shows how the history of the land is based on erasure and oppression of minorities.

Me, slowly eating the breadticks, and ordering a wedding ring on my phone: Go on

[mehreenkasana]

There were 14 other gun-based murder-suicides in the past week in this country, resulting in the loss of 36 lives. If you look down the list of the killings, an unmistakeable pattern pops out: “shot and killed his 37-year-old wife… shot and killed his ex-wife… shot and killed his 62-year-old wife… shot and killed his 23-year-old girlfriend…” and so on. Most of these killings involve men killing women that they were in a relationship with, had lost a relationship with, or likely wanted a relationship with, but were rejected. This last week also featured a bizarre story of a woman who not only survived being kidnapped and raped by a man but also saw her boyfriend and a random other man killed in the rapist-murderer’s rampage.

Men kill women in the United States so often that it usually is not even newsworthy. (via mehreenkasana)

[weltenwellen]

I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots―prostitute, housewife, saint―like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

Janet Fitch  (via closedforprayer)

[blacklivesmatterumd]

On the one hand, there is a message, “Black Lives Matter,” which always risks being misheard (“What? Only black lives matter?”) or not heard at all (“these are just people who will protest anything”). On the other hand, the assembly, even without words, enacts the message in its own way. For it is often in public spaces where such violence takes place, so reclaiming public space to oppose both racism and violence is an act that reverberates throughout the public sphere through various media.

When some people rejoin with “All Lives Matter” they misunderstand the problem, but not because their message is untrue. It is true that all lives matter, but it is equally true that not all lives are understood to matter which is precisely why it is most important to name the lives that have not mattered, and are struggling to matter in the way they deserve.

Claiming that “all lives matter” does not immediately mark or enable black lives only because they have not been fully recognized as having lives that matter. I do not mean this as an obscure riddle. I mean only to say that we cannot have a race-blind approach to the questions: which lives matter? Or, which lives are worth valuing? If we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, “all lives matter,” then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of “all lives.” That said, it is true that all lives matter (we can then debate about when life begins or ends). But to make that universal formulation concrete, to make that into a living formulation, one that truly extends to all people, we have to foreground those lives that are not mattering now, to mark that exclusion, and militate against it. Achieving that universal, “all lives matter,” is a struggle, and that is part of what we are seeing on the streets. For on the streets we see a complex set of solidarities across color lines that seek to show what a concrete and living sense of bodies that matter can be.

[mahakavi]

Mainstream feminism today within the USA has been co-opted and cheapened into the narrow struggle to fill men shoes – while preserving the capitalist, racist, imperialist, and even patriarchal inequalities that make up the very fabric of those shoes. ‘Feminism’ is bombing Afghanistan to liberate women. ‘Feminism’ is breaking gender roles by posing for bikini shots and joining the military. ‘Feminism’ is becoming a power-CEO or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. This shallow vision of gender justice has so permeated even progressive circles that our very definition of sexism is circumscribed. Too often, sexism is merely seen as a set of cultural behaviors or personal biases; challenging sexism is simply seen as breaking these gender expectations. But sexism is an institutionalized system, with historical, political, and economic dimensions.

Huibin Amelia Chew, Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism (via mahakavi)

[iggymogo]

The creation of the ICC was partly an attempt to answer criticisms of imperialism or bias, but McCargo points to the fact that of the 36 people the ICC has indicted in the entirety of its existence, all 36 have been African leaders. This implies unfair selectivity at best, and smacks of neocolonialism at worst.

Elizabeth Peet, Why is the International Criminal Court so bad at prosecuting war criminals? (via beemill)

[margescreaming]

Malcom X being incredibly relevant in 1964

[unofamilia]

💣

[observando]

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

Bertrand Russell (via observando)

[nizariat]

I’m one of them, those who die when they love. أنا من أولئك، ممن يموتون حين يحبون

Mahmoud Darwish (via nizariat)

[arabicquotes]

وطن المرء ليس مكان ولادته و لكنه المكان الذي تنتهي فيه كل محاولاته للهروب Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease

Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) -  Egyptian writer & novelist; won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 (via spinals)

[larmoyante]

I watched a girl in a sundress kiss another girl on a park bench, and just as the sunlight spilled perfectly onto both of their hair, I thought to myself: ‘How bravely beautiful it is, that sometimes, the sea wants the city, even when it has been told its entire life it was meant for the shore.’

Christopher Poindexter (via larmoyante)

[proletarianfeminism]

The oppression of women, after all, did not begin with capitalism. What began with capitalism was the more intense exploitation of women as women and the possibility at last of their liberation.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “The power of women and the subversion of the community” (via proletarianfeminism)

[watchoutforintellect]

I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.

Sylvia Plath - from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (via watchoutforintellect)

[watchoutforintellect]

I have been, and am, battling depression. It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative - which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

Sylvia Plath - from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath   (via closedforprayer)