Quotes

A

• This is my body. If I give it to you
  I want it back. My life
  is a non-negotiable demand.
  - Marge Piercy, "Right to Life"

accountability

• Who's the beer thief? You! You're the beer thief.
  - Sharon Osbourne to Ozzy, after he says someone stole his beer

• How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want?
  - Jerry Colonna
• They understand that they have created daddy.
  - Alice Sparkly Kat
• Above all, be the heroine of your life.
  - Nora Ephron
• After you reach a certain age, you just have to take responsibility for your life. You can blame it on other people all you want, but too bad. We’ve all been dealt a hand.
  - John Waters, "'I’m Tired Of Being Accepted': John Waters Is Only Getting Grosser"

• Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
  - Rainer Maria Rilke

afterlife

• an infinite, a super-infinite, an unimaginable space
  - John Donne, in a sermon

• They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.
  - Alice Munro, "The Moons of Jupiter"

animals

• non-local beings
  - a term for invasive species, from the Ojibwe Lifeways section from Gikinoo’wizhiwe Onji Waaban (G-WOW)

• Got no garbage here. Only the expressions of the soul!
  - Old Lady Hackmore, Ernest Scared Stupid

• We have art in order to not die from the truth.
  -Friedrich Nietzsche
• Recognizing that people's actions don't belong to you is the only sane way to create. If people enjoy what you've created, terrific. If people ignore what you've created, too bad. If people misunderstand what you've created, don't sweat it. And if people absolutely hate what you've created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud? Just smile sweetly and suggest - as politely as you possibly can - that they make their own fucking art. Then stubbornly continue making yours.
  - Elizabeth Gilbert
• All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
  - Oscar Wilde
• Don't do [Poetric Terrorism] for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least not for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives - but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.
  - Hakim Bey, "Poetic Terrorism"

B

• Everything I know about baseball can be traced back to that scene from Twilight.
  - Sarah Hogle, Twice Shy

• Beauty, women's business in this society, is the theater of their enslavement. Only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.
  - Susan Sontag
• Any woman who counts on her face is a fool.
  - Zadie Smith, "On Beauty"
• It's amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
  - Leo Tolstoy

• But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing.
  - Kate Chopin, The Awakening

• It is enough to take a closer look at any war—most recently in Ukraine—to see how quickly women's bodies become objects of revenge, a weapon of terror meant to dominate and humiliate the enemy.
  - Eva Stachniak, "Silence We Inherit and Carry With Us: An Interview with Eva Stachniak"

• He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.
  -Jean-Luc Godard

C

• Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
  - Edward Abbey
• Fascism is capitalism plus murder.
  -Upton Sinclair
• I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.
  -Eugene Debs

• Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.
  - Augustine of Hippo

• sublimation
  - the transition of a substance directly from a solid state to a gas state, skipping the liquid state in the process

• Then I saw the city of perfect machines.
  - from an illustration by Elliot Dold, inspired by "Twilight" by John W. Campbell (1934)
• The metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.
  - Jane Jacobs

• When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how idealogues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stimatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.
  - Sarah Kendizov
• It is a problem of how we reward work, the kind of work we reward most generously, and how we conceive of society's responsibility for its poor and not just to them—in other words, people are poor because society makes them that way, because it is more important to most of America to pay millions of dollars to bankers than it is to pay a decent salary to teachers and sanitation workers and store clerks, and because they need to keep people poor enough to accept work they may not want to do.
  - Christian Livermore, "'Some Things Never Leave You': Christian Livermore on Poverty's Indelible Marks"
• Most assuredly the bourgeoisie has no right to complain of the violence of its foes, since its whole history, as a class, is a history of bloodshed, and since the system of exploitation, which is the law of its life, daily produces hecatombs of innocents. Assuredly, too, it is not political parties who should complain of violence, for these are, one and all, red-handed with blood spilt unnecessarily, and wholly in their own interest.
  - Enrico Malatesta, "Anarchy and Violence"

• Show me a man who has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
  - Charles Bukowski collapse
  • Societal collapse is in the air.
    -Timotheé Chalomet
  commercialization
  • Commercializating is the antithesis of weird.
    - Red Wassenich
  commonplace book
  • Make your own bible. Select and collect all those words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the breast of a trumpet out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John, and Paul.
    - Ralph Waldo Emerson
  community
  • The most daring thing young people can do is create communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
    - Kurt Vonnegut
  • We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.
    - Thich Nhat Hanh
  • No person, trying to take responsibility for his or her identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.
    - Adrienne Rich

D

• There will be no placeholder no
  land     no candles     no water     no six-foot empty
      she will be unmarked
  - Janice Lobo Sapigao, "There Will Be No Funeral"
• Aim to die brok.e Give to your beneficiaries before you die; it's more fun and useful. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce.
  - Kevin Kelly
• It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
  or your days: they will be wrong,
  they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
  all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.
  - Jane Hirshfield, "It Was Like This: You Were Happy"
• Being dead wasn't a problem, but being forgotten, now that's a bitch!
  - Freddy Krueger, Freddy vs. Jason
• maschalismos
  - the practice of physcally rendering the dead incapable of rising
• psychogenic death
  - the phenomenon of sudden death as brought about by a strong emotional shock, such as fear

• I think the scary part is thinking that you will experience the nothing. We instinctively think this because experiencing is all we know. But the nothing will be timeless and unexperienced. Like if you had anesthesia and didn't know how long passed before you woke up. You just never wake up.
  - thykarmabenill, Reddit

• We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.
  - James Baldwin

• When someone tells you not to bother dreaming, they're not on your side.
  - Jami Attenberg, I Came All This Way to Meet You

• There are, of course, other people driving in America. You must try to love them.
  - James Parker, "An Ode to Driving in America"

E

• Someone in Hell is sitting beside you on the train. Someobdy burning unnoticed walks past in the street.
  - Franz Wright

• doing a geographic
  - a term, common in Alcoholics Anonymous, that refers to moving to a new location to escape problems rather than addressing them at their root

F

• I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
  but just coming to the end of his triumph.
  - Jack Gilbert, "Failing and Flying"

• We were just a band that made it very, very big, that's all.
  - John Lennon

• A hoe never gets cold.
  - Cardi B, maybe?
• In 1944, one WWII veteran even waged a one-man protest against sloppy sweaters at the University of Minnesota. He declared that "co-ed" dressing wasn't what he'd fought for in battle, and likened the fashion trend to the horrors of war.
  - Marlen Komar, "The Feminist History of the Cardigan"

• Sometimes fear does not subside and you must do it afraid.
  - Elisabeth Elliot
• Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?" Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of god. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are born to manifest the Glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it's in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
  - Maryanne Williamson

• Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties.

  Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions, for safety in the streets, for child care, for social welfare, for rape crisis centres, women's refuges, reforms in the law.
  - Dale Spender, Man Made Language

• Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
  - Hilary Mantel
• I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
  - Rebecca West

• You like bananas.
  - a woman in Aldi, to her crying child
• Del looked at the racks of peaceful cheeses, and wondered if they knew they had the heart of stars.
  - DK Mok, "The Spider and the Stars"
• Our fridge was full of rotting aspirations: the salad-bound cucumber, now leaking brown fluit; the forgotten, softening strawberries, the marinara sauce furred with mold.
  - Leslie Jamison, "The Birth of My Daughter, the Death of My Marriage"
• Just give me my potato, any potato, and I'm happy.
  - Dolly Parton
• I want to keep fighting because it is the only thing that keeps me out of the hamburger joints. If I don't fight, I'll eat this world.
  - George Foreman

• Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.
  - Coretta Scott King
• Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.
  - Assata Shaker
• I think freedom, ideally, is being able to choose your responsibilities. Not not having any responsibilities, but being able to choose which things you want to be responsible for.
  - Toni Morrison
• You have more freedom than you are using.
  - Dan Attoe
• Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well. What are you going to do?
  - Anne Lamott

G

• Possibly there was approximate parity between men and women during the Middle and Upper Paleolithic, and that period may have been the most gender-equal time in human history.
  - Wikipedia article on the Paleolithic period
• For most of history, anonymous was a woman.
  - Virginia Woolf

• The task of genius is to keep the miracle alive, to live always in the miracle, to make the miracle more and more miraculous, to swear allegiance to nothing, but live only miraculously, think only miraculously.
  - Henry Miller

• subduction
  - the action of one tectonic plate getting pushed underneath another tectonic plage

• mashriq al-adhkār
  - a Bahāʾī Faith house of worship, which in Arabic (according to Britannica) translates to "a place where the uttering of the name of God arises at dawn"
• For those who believe in God, the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
  - Charles Bukowski

• Disenfrancised grief is a particularly difficult form of loss to overcome because the majority of cases involving this form of grief are the consequences of personal decisions of behaviors made. Such loss often creates a sense of shame or guilt within the individual or that person's family, making it difficult to openly mourn, discuss, or cope with the actions that have created the loss.
  - Katie Heaton, "The Sibling Experience: Grief & Coping with Sibling Incarceration"

H

• Hairspray will fix anything.
  - Ernest P. Worrell, Ernest Scared Stupid

• It's interesting that removing work from the equation makes a lot of our current definitions of success and happiness quite meaningless. It could be very powerful to imagine what happiness could be if it's not just survival, success, capital.
  - Nicole Froio, "The Future of Work is No Work"

• Hope is even more important than talent.
  - Bobby McIlvaine
• and I am waiting
  perpetually and forever
  a renaissance of wonder
  - Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "I Am Waiting"

• The best and worst of everything could be teaching you just about anything.
  - Cal Garrison, Capricorn horoscope, August 20, 2017
• The Crab Fest begins with the summer solstice...
  - AstroTwins, Cancer horoscope, June 13, 2021
• These are two planets that move slowly, like little turtles in deep space...
  - Susan Miller, Capricorn horoscope, June 2023

• In a 40-year career in horror, David Cronenberg never dreamed up an image as chilling or stomach-churning as Dana Carvey as a human turtle.
  - Matt Singer, reviewing The Master of Disguise

I

• You are not a reflection of the people who can't love you.
• It ain't what they call you; it's what you answer to.
  - W.C. Fields
• It doesn't matter what your name is!
  - The Rock

• I run a startup, and I'm using my brain very regularly.
  - Samuel Rason, "The Hunks Are All Right"

J

• Discovering more joy does not, I'm sorry to safe, save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak. In fact, we may cry more easily, but we will laugh more easily too. Perhaps we are just more alive. Yet as we discover more joy, we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters. We have hardship without becoming hard. We have heartbreak without being broken.
  - Desmond Tutu
• If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not often very kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that's often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not to be made a crumb.
  - Mary Oliver

K

• Treat everyone you meet like they are God in drag.
  -Ram Dass

L

• Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
  - Bertrand Russell

• You are not a reflection of the people who can't love you.
  - Caitlyn Siehl
• There is no love which does not become help.
  - Paul Tillich

• Paul Oakenfold, New Order, and the Pet Shop Boys. What did you do to deserve this?!
  - Neil Tennant (of the Pet Shop Boys), to the crowd in Minneapolis on October 2, 2022

M

N

• the shining star of losers everywhere
  - the nickname of Haru Urara, a losing Japanese racehorse

O

• Things like cynicism and irony and negativity, those are syndromes of a lazy mind. It takes no effort to give in. It's too easy to be a cynic. It's too easy to be ironic. It's too easy to be negative. It's a lot more harder to be like Charles Bukowski or Tom Waits and find a piece of trash on the street and be like, “You know what? This is the best fucking thing I've ever seen in my fucking life.” It's a hardcore romanticism. I kind of come from that school of thought. I think that being here on Earth is a gift to make a full use of before whatever the next stage is. A lot effort is required for that. I'm not scared of the effort and willing to give my 100% to speed up evolution. Something has got to happen.
  - Eugene Hutz
• When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It's how I've learned to survive through everything. I know you see yourself as a fighter. Well, I see myself as one too. This is how I fight.
  - Waymond Wang, Everything Everywhere All At Once

• You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
  - Anne Lamott

P

• I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse.
  - Brendan Behan

• Night soil is a historically used euphemism for human excreta collected from cesspools, privies, pail closets, pit latrines, privy middens, septic tanks, etc. This material was removed from the immediate area, usually at night.
  - Wikipedia page on night soil

• At some point, you stop caring about your enormous potential.
  - Dan Kois, Vintage Contemporaries

• It didn't occur to me that ignoring parts of my life I wasn't interested in was a privilege that came at a cost to people I care about.
  - Albert Samha, "Tom Brady and the Selfishness of Conventional Masculinity"

• You can do it like it's a great weight, or you can do it like it's part of the dance.
  - Ram Dass

• Laziness does not exist.
  - Devon Price
• You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don't know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don't need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.
  - Becky Chambers, Psalm for the Wild-built
• You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.
  - Hank Green
• nèijuǎn
  - a Chinese term, translated to "involution," referring to increased effort and competition leading to diminishing returns and, eventually, a sense of stagnation as one becomes trapped in a cycle of pointless competition

• It may be that we no longer know what to do when we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
  - Wendell Berry

Q

R

• When tyranny becomes law, rebellion is a right.
  - Simon Bolivar

• The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
  - Mary Oliver

• We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
  - Ursula K. Le Guin
• Revenge is the capitalism of the poor: conserve the original wound, defer immediate gratification, fatten the first insult with new insults, invest and reinvest spite, and keep waiting for the perfect moment to strike back.
  - Aravind Adiga
• Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation and that is an act of political warfare.
  - Audre Lorde
• Power cedes nothing without a demand.
  - Frederick Douglas
• You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
  -Jessica Mitford
• The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

  Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

  Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
  - Arundhati Roy

• You have to ask as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.
  -Angela Davis

S

• The doors to the world of the wild self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.
  - Gloria Pinkola Estes, Wome Who Run with the WolveS

• Sexual violence exerts one more terrible price. Silence. Silence forced by shame, by fear of reprisals, by the wish to spare the loved ones from pain. Silence of the victims and the perpetrators, of women and men. Silence which seeps through generations, silence we inherit as children and carry with us all our lives.
  - Eva Stachniak, "Silence We Inherit and Carry With Us: An Interview with Eva Stachniak"
• If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
  - Zora Neale Hurston

• Let's go outside and make a fertility goddess.
  - Charles, when it snows in Frosty Returns

• But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be laone, we can be with others without using them as a means for escape.
  - bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

• To speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish.
  - Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to Know

• If you bring forth what is in you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
  - Gospel of Thomas, verse 70
• You will never be brilliant if you're trying to extinguish shameful feelings. You can never truly step into the light if you're too busy avoiding the dark.
  - Jamie Varon, "How to Make Resolutions You'll Actually Keep"

• I always had hopes of being a big star. But as yu get older, you aim a little lower. Everybody wants to make an impression, some mark upon the world. Then you think, you've made a mark on the world if you just get through it, and a few people remember your name. Then you've left a mark. You don't have to bend the whole world. I think it's better to just enjoy it. Pay your dues, an djust enjoy it. If you shoot and arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you.
  Dorian Corey, Paris is Burning

T

• In the 1994 paper "Household Appliances and the Use of Time," the economists Sue Bowden and Avner Offer found that time-using technologies (such as TV) diffused faster throughout the consumer economy than time-saving technologies (sch as vacuum cleaners and refrigerators). The reasons are complex; breadwinner husbands may have demanded TVs before vacuums because they didn't clean the house. But bowden and Offer conclude that time-using novelties might also spread faster because they delight people and confer status.
  - Derek Thompson, "Why Americans Care About Work So Much"
• How cool would it be if technology was a thing that supported life instead of being a thing that robs life in an effort to save capitalism?
  - Alice Sparkly Kat

• I don't trust anybody who hasn't shoplifted.
  - John Waters

U

V

W

• solvitur ambulando
  - in Latin, "it is solved by walking"

X

Y

Z