Quotes

thus, too, they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.- the plague

hitoshi had an extremely eccentric younger brother. his way of thinking, his responses to events, were "curiouser and curiouser". he lived exactly as if his awareness of things had been formed in some other dimension, after which he was plopped down on this planet to fend for himself.- moonlight shadow

i must keep living with the flowing river before my eyes. -moonlight shadow

I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. - black boy

Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others.- the fall

Above all, don't believe your friends when they ask you to be sincere with them. They merely hope you will encourage them in the good opinion they have of themselves by providing them with the additional assurance they will find in your promise of sincerity.- the fall

Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace. - the quiet american

Then I must be a greater than Daedalus; for whereas he only made his own inventions move, I move those of other people as well.- euthyphro

No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nurture and education. - crito

See now, how men lay blame upon us gods for what is after all nothing but their own folly. -the odyssey 

Yet it would perhaps be thought to be better, indeed to be our duty, for the sake of maintaining the truth even to destroy what touches us closely, especially as we are philosophers or lovers of wisdom; for, while both are dear, piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.- nicomachean ethics

Hence, it is no easy task to be good.-nicomachean ethics

All postures of submission and surrender should be part of our prehistory. -christopher hitchens

a woman's biology would not be her destiny.-before roe v.wade

All the variety, all the charm, all the

beauty of life is made up of light and shadow."- anna karenina

*

I hate the moon - I am afraid of it - for when it shines on certain scenes 

familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous. -What the Moon Brings by H.P. Lovecraft

sorrows of young werther- 

I couldn't draw now, not a line, but I have never been a greater painter than in these moments. pg. 7

And then, hemmed in as he is, he still always holds in his heart the sweet feeling of freedom, and that he can quit this prison whenever he likes. p.10

The world is everywhere the same, in effort and work, reward and joy, but what is that to me? p.53

To die! What does it mean? Look, we dream when we talk about death. p.66-

rumi poems- 

lightning, your presence

from ground to sky.

no one knows what becomes of me,

when you take me so quickly.

i can break off from anyone

except the presence within.

anyone can bring gifts.

give me someone who takes away.

the friend comes into my body

looking for the center, unable

to find it, draws a blade,

strikes anywhere.

    

keep walking, though there's no space to get to.

don't try to see through the distances.

that's not for human beings. move within,

but don't move the way fear makes you move.

Dance, when you're broken open.

dance, if you've torn the bandage off.

dance in the middle of the fighting.

dance in your blood.

dance, when you're perfectly free.

doves

people want you to be happy.

don't keep serving them your pain.

if you could untie your wings

and free your soul of jealousy,

you and everyone around you

would fly up like doves.

Choose to love what does not die.

fear

everyone can see how they have polished the mirror

of the self, which is done with the longings

we're given.

    not everyone wants to be King!

there are different roles and many choices 

within each.

       Troubles come. one person packs up

and leaves. another stays and deepens in a love

for being human.

         In battle, one runs fearing

for his life. another, just as scared, turns 

and fights more fiercely.

longing

longing is the core of mystery

longing itself brings the cure

the only rule is, suffer the pain.

your desire must be disciplined,

and what you want to happen

in time, sacrificed.

We have been busy accumulating solace.

make us afraid of how we were.

let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,

absentminded, someone sober

will worry about things going badly.

let the lover be.

the allure of love

someone who does not run

toward the allure of love walks

a road where nothing lives.

but this dove here senses

the love-hawk floating above

and waits and will not be driven

or scared to safety.

where you love from

look inside and find where a person

loves from. that's the reality,

not what they say.

                      Hypocrites

give attention to form, the right

and wrong ways of professing belief.

grow instead in universal light.

when that revealed itself, god gave it

a thousand different names, the least 

of those sweet-breathing names being,

the one who is not in need of anyone.

music we are (snippet)

Poems are rough notations for the music we are.

go with muddy feet-nanao sakaki

When you hear dirty story

                wash your ears.

When you see ugly stuff

                 wash your eyes.

When you get bad thoughts 

               wash your mind.

                   and

Keep your feet muddy.

 five things

first, when I was apart from you,

this world did not exist, nor any other.

second, whatever I was looking for

was always you.

looking for alaska- "you spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. you just use the future to escape the present."

"it would appear that Western civilization has endured two millennia of consecrated sexual neurosis simply because the authors of Matthew and Luke could not read hebrew"- the end of faith

"Tell him," the colonel said, smiling, "that a person doesn't die when he should but when he can." -one hundred years of solitude

"The gods of the hearth exist for us still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots." silas marner

"man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances."-walden

   Just simply alive, 

Both of us, I

   And the poppy. 

-Issa

  The long night;

The sound of the water

  Says what I think.

-Gochiku

   The cool on the bridge;

The moon and I

   Alone remain.

-Kikusha-ni

  Out in the fields

Together with the birds,

   I will be surrounded with mist.

-Chora

   Yield to the willow

All the loathing, all the desire

   Of your heart.

-Basho

  Tranquility:

Walking alone;

  Happy alone.

-Shiki

  There is neither heaven nor earth,

Only snow

  Falling incessantly.

-Hashin

Such is the classic tale of love, with one boy moving toward another, one heartbeat following another. No one can change this scenario; it is something that cannot be outlawed. Love has its own season and its own history.-all that is gone-pramoedya anent toer

….because there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.- the history of love

We should not seek immortality in reproduction. - the selfish gene

I much preferred to swim on and on, alone, in silence. - south of the border, west of the sun

but i didn't understand then. that i could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. that a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair. 

look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. rain has the power to hypnotize.

sometimes when i look at you, i feel like i'm gazing at a distant star, i said. it's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. maybe the star doesn't even exist anymore. yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.

"this was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles".

-half of a yellow sun

But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.

brothers karamazov

i think if the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness. -''

god is not in strength but in truth.'

extremely loud & incredibly close- 

i just couldn't be dead any longer.

palace walk-

The way love can disregard fears, however, is an age-old wonder.

the weight of heaven-

and at other times, he gazed at her with the cloudy, distant eyes of a man who had traveled in space for so long he had forgotten what life on earth was like.

bertrand russell - why i am not a christian"…only those who slavishly worship success can think that effectiveness is admirable without regard to what is effected." p. vii

delusions of gender-

When we think confidently compare the “female mind” and the “male mind”, we think of something stable inside the head of the person, the product of a “female” or “male” brain. p. xxvi

In other words, women and men may differ not so much in actual empathy but in “how empathetic they would like to appear to others (and, perhaps, to themselves)”, as Eisenberg put it to Schaffer. p. 16

The take-home message of these studies is that we can’t separate people’s empathizing ability and motivation from the social situation. p. 22

In other words, when we are not thinking of ourselves as “male” or “female”, our judgments are the same, and women and men alike are sensitive to the influence of social distance that, rightly or wrongly, pushes moral judgments in one direction or another along the care-justice continuum. p. 25

And it’s important to bear in mind that these jittery, self-defeating mechanisms are not characteristic of the female mind -- they’re characteristic of the mind under threat. p. 34

-referring to stereotype threat

What psychological processes lie behind this turning away from masculine interests? One possibility is that, as we learned in an earlier chapter, when stereotypes of women become salient, women tend to incorporate those stereotypical traits into their current self-perception. p. 44

Women prefer those kinds of dead-end jobs because they fit better with their family commitments, the companies typically claimed in their defense when their happily fulfilled female employees filed lawsuits against them. p. 69

As Tichenor points out, what this means is that “cultural expectations of what it means to be a good wife shape the domestic negotiations of unconventional earners and produce arrangements that privilege husbands and further burden wives.” p. 82

and yet as we’ve seen, higher fetal testosterone in nonclinical populations has not been convincingly linked with better mental rotation ability, systemizing ability, mathematical ability, scientific ability, or worse mind reading. p. 130

“Just because you see a response [in the brain] -- you don’t get to claim it’s hard-wired.” p. 171

When it comes to genes, you get what you get. But gene activity is another story: genes switch on and off depending on what else is going on. Our environment, our behavior, even our thinking, can all change what genes are expressed. p. 177

Biology can be said to define possibilities but not determine them; it is never irrelevant but it is also not determinant. p. 178

But the gender gap is narrowing all the time, and shows that mathematical eminence is not fixed, or hardwired or intrinsic, but it is instead responsive to cultural factors that affect the extent to which mathematical talent is identified and nurtured, or passed over, stifled, or suppressed in males and females. p. 184

The circuits of the brain are quite literally a products of your physical, social, and cultural environment, as well as your behavior and thoughts. p. 236

the poison wood bible - barbara kingsolver

This forest eats itself and lives forever. p.5

Leah says in Congo there's only two ages of people: babies that have to be carried, and people that stand up and fend for themselves. No in-between phase. No such thing as childhood. Sometimes I think she's right. p. 358

You have nothing to lose but your chains. But I don't happen to agree. If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from. p. 495