Aster > Aster's Quotes

“Hope is the weapon of the masses and the poor. Hope is the thread between brutal reality and the imagined heaven. Hope is the only medicine in the lives of people who are wounded by society. Hope is the chance to bring change. Those who mock the existence of hope can never understand the quest of the exploited masses for emancipation.”
― Yogesh Maitreya, Flowers on the Grave of Caste

“Because when flowers are alive, they spread beauty and when they die, no one cries.”
― Yogesh Maitreya, Flowers on the Grave of Caste

“You never know in what shape or form the caste instinct inside you is channelised into an act. To read about caste discrimination, to think that it's bad, to think that it should be abolished is very easy and comforting, but to prohibit oneself from practising it is very difficult.”
― Yogesh Maitreya, Flowers on the Grave of Caste

“I feel at home in the entire world, wherever
there are clouds and birds and human tears”
― Rosa Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

“You know the funny thing about Afghanistan?’ Griffin’s voice was very soft. ‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawaddy, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“It’s French, Letty.’ Ramy rolled his eyes. ‘Latin’s flimsiest daughter. How hard could it be?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“The origins of the word 'anger' were tied closely to physical suffering. 'Anger' was first an 'affliction', as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a 'painful, cruel, narrow' state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in term came from the Latin angor, which meant 'strangling, anguish, distress'. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable.”
― Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“the phrase comes to him before the emotion; but we must add that he is nevertheless a born writer, a man who detests meals, servants, ease, respectability or anything that gets between him and his art; who has kept his freedom when most of his contemporaries have long ago lost theirs; who is ashamed of nothing but being ashamed; who says whatever he has it in his mind to say, and has taught himself an accent, a cadence, indeed a language, for saying it in which, though they are not English, but Irish, will give him his place among the lesser immortals of our tongue.”
― Virginia Woolf