pastelpencilcase > pastelpencilcase 's Quotes

“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, although I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Living simply makes loving simple.”
― bell hooks

“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”
― bell hooks

“There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can. The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison

“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.”
― alice walker, The Color Purple

“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
― Alice Walker

“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.”
― Alice Walker

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”
― Alice Walker

“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”
― Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying

“You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”
― Adrienne Rich

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.”
― Adrienne Rich

“When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”
― Adrienne Rich

“That's why I want to speak to you now.

To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his 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. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.)

I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.”
― Adrienne Rich, Sources

“Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978

“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
― Adrienne Rich

“[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
― Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.”
― Adrienne Rich

“There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.”
― Adrienne Rich

“The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.”
― Adrienne Rich

“For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.”
― Adrienne Rich

“To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.”
― Adrienne Rich

“To do something very common, in my own way.”
― Adrienne Rich

“Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
― L.M. Montgomery

“I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.”
― L.M. Montgomery