galerna ☾✶ > galerna ☾✶'s Quotes

“I’m not saying we’ll live to see some sort of paradise. But just fighting for change makes you stronger. Not hoping for anything will kill you for sure. Take a chance, Jess. You’re already wondering if the world could change. Try imagining a world worth living in, and then ask yourself if that isn’t worth fighting for. You’ve come too far to give up on hope, Jess.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“This is what courage is. It’s not just living through the nightmare, it’s doing something with it afterward. It’s being brave enough to talk about it to other people. It’s trying to organize to change things.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“A searing anxiety developed inside me at this thought, in the same form it always took no matter what external stimulus triggered it: first the realization that I would die, then that everyone else would die, and then that the universe itself would eventually experience heat death, a kind of thought sequence that expanded outward endlessly in forms too huge to be contained inside my body.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“I felt like I needed something official to show me how all of this should feel, how I should be acting, what I should be saying--even if it was just some dumb movie that wasn't really official at all.”
― Emily M. Danforth, The Miseducation of Cameron Post

“I had always liked the act of leaving, the expanse between departure and arrival when you’re seemingly nowhere, defined by another kind of time.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent, but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet