Devin > Devin's Quotes

“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Embrace diversity.
Unite—
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“When apparent stability disintegrates,
As it must--
God is Change--
People tend to give in
To fear and depression,
To need and greed.
When no influence is strong enough
To unify people
They divide.
They struggle,
One against one,
Group against group,
For survival, position, power.
They remember old hates and generate new ones,
The create chaos and nurture it.
They kill and kill and kill,
Until they are exhausted and destroyed,
Until they are conquered by outside forces,
Or until one of them becomes
A leader
Most will follow,
Or a tyrant
Most fear.”
― Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Your teachers
Are all around you.
All that you perceive,
All that you experience,
All that is given to you
or taken from you,
All that you love or hate,
need or fear
Will teach you--
If you will learn.
God is your first
and your last teacher.
God is your harshest teacher:
subtle,
demanding.
Learn or die.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“PRODIGY IS, AT ITS essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“That’s what an empire is,” he said, “an orchestrator of gravity, a sun around which all weaker things spin.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“She soon learned that to survive atrocity is to be made an honorary consul to a republic of pain. There existed unspoken protocols governing how she was expected to suffer. Total breakdown, a failure to grieve graciously, was a violation of those rules. But so was the absence of suffering, so was outright forgiveness.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“They didn’t understand, they just didn’t understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“Since its foundation, Poland was evolving. With ever-changing geographical boundaries, its ethnic composition varied as new communities folded into its borders. Medieval Jews migrated to Poland because it was a safe haven from western Europe, where they were persecuted and expelled. Jews were relieved to arrive in this tolerant land with economic opportunity. “Polin,” the Hebrew name for the country, comprises “Po” and “Lin,” and means “Here, we stay.” Polin offered relative freedom and safety. A future.”
― Judy Batalion, The Light of Days

“But you know what’s worse than suffering? Not suffering, because you’re not even alive to feel it.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun

“Rooted in black and Chicana feminist thought, intersectional feminism calls into question the idea that the social oppression of women can be adequately analyzed and contested solely by concentrating on the category “woman.” Intersectional feminism insists that there is no essential “Woman” who is universally oppressed. To understand the oppression of any particular woman or group of women means taking into account all of the things that intersect with their being women, such as race, class, nationality, religion, disability, sexuality, citizenship status, and myriad other circumstances that marginalize or privilege them—including having transgender or gender-nonconforming feelings or identities.”
― Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

“His brain warns him that there are words that cover up the world. There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, Tender Is the Flesh

“This was a place young people felt safe, safe enough to be mildly radical. To pass around pamphlets for just about anything, and not worry about the imperial censorship boards. Who would censor kids just learning to be servants of empire?”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“A MIND is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditioned response, and past action held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signaling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“The rhetoric that rural white women lacked womanliness because they were drudges who farmed the land was built on a long-held anti-Black and anti-Indigenous settler colonial logic that categorized those who lived close to and worked the land as less than human.”
― Stacy Jane Grover, Tar Hollow Trans: Essays

“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles—this they name empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
― Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

“You see,” said Tailor Schwenke, the littlest of my ten little men, “there was always a secret war against Hitler in the regime. They fought him with unfair means. Himmler I detested. Goebbels, too. If Hitler had been told the truth, things would have been different.” For “Hitler” read “I.”
― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45

“No—how widely was the whole thing, or anything, known?” “Oh. Widely, very widely.” “How?” “Oh, things seeped through somehow, always quietly, always indirectly. So people heard rumors, and the rest they could guess. Of course, most people did not believe the stories of Jews or other opponents of the regime. It was naturally thought that such persons would all exaggerate.”
― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45

“It was a DuPont-funded scientist who first articulated the principle that now forms the bedrock of our system for regulating potentially toxic substances—namely, that they should be presumed safe until proven otherwise.”
― Mariah Blake, They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals