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clearly, I don’t want to be part of this.
It is often a good thing not to visit one’s utopia.
“It all seemed so simple for her,” Auralice tells me now as we sit on the dam under a neem tree.
Life takes you in a direction, and then you’re in a place.
in the future, education will break out of the four walls of classrooms and take place in everyday life
You keep going by not stopping; faith has its own momentum.
The future, I repeat, I leave to the Lord. So, please, stop worrying. You have done well to have a child so well placed—believe me.”
One of the first officially recognized victims of China’s Cultural Revolution was a teacher. On August 5, 1966, a group of tenth graders at the Beijing Normal University Girls High School, in the heart of the Chinese capital, began violently attacking their instructors. They were responding to demands by the Party leadership for a “thorough criticism of academia, educators, journalists, artists, publishers, and other representatives of the capitalist class.” The students seized a group of five teachers, sprayed ink on them, hung boards marked with red X’s on their necks, threw boiling water
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She was the first of around one hundred teachers killed that month in just the western part of Beijing.
starts having a horrible feeling of déjà vu. “Putain, on ne va pas revisiter ça!” (Damn, we’re not going to relive that!),
“How could you be so stupid?” Jeans asks him. “The others are just kids, they don’t know what they’re doing. But you’ve lived through so much, you understand the symbolism of this. How could you do it?” The neighbor seems sheepish; he knows what he’s been part of. Then he turns defiant. “We had to do something,” he says. “Action is better than inaction.”
They say they don’t remember; they insist they weren’t there. “You know what probably happened,” one of the neighbors finally says. “We probably don’t remember because sometimes when people do things like that, they aren’t really themselves. It wasn’t really us at your house that day.”
Edmund Burke’s famous dictum that all that’s necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. On
And what is crazy, anyway? Crazy is a blunt concept. There are levels of intensity, degrees of deviation from the norm.
There are so many different versions of a good life.
questioning the tracks we’re pursuing and dwelling on what feels like a stultifying sameness, a conformity of outlook and aspiration to all the lives in that room (ours included).
“The hardest thing in a marriage is really to look at each other, to step outside yourself and be curious about the other.”
birthdays are good times to introspect.
at the end of my meditation I always feel that nothing matters all that much, and that’s kind of the point.
everything is all right, that it’s all going to be okay—and even if it isn’t, that’s okay, too.
The sensation can be uncomfortable, but experiencing the world as an outsider also cultivates a form of insight and wisdom: a knowledge that there are other pathways and, if nothing else, the capacity to dream about different realities.
