Category: Quotes
Someone said this
What is Found There
A poem can’t free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged upon us, have accepted as our own. It’s not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it’s an instrument for embodied experience. But we seek that experience, or recognize it when it is offered to us, because it reminds us in some way of our need. After that re-arousal of desire, the task of acting on that truth, or making love, or meeting other needs, is ours.
– Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
A Mote of Dust
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. …
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
– Carl Sagan
It’s Just Words
How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
What To Want
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
All Over Again
Every morning I wake up and think I’m going to start my life all over again. Then I look in the mirror and realise that I can’t.
– Julie Harris
Fantastically Rocky
I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life.
– J. D. Salinger
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