Mitch > Mitch's Quotes

“People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“He ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there’s nothing for them to do, they still can’t admit it openly.”
― David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

“If cats could write history, their history would be mostly about cats.”
― Eugen Weber

“People who live through sexual assault are a crash on the side of the road, and the American media is nothing more than cars slowing down just long enough to take a peek.”
― Amber Tamblyn, Any Man

“I learned you haven't read anything if you've only read something once or twice. Reading things more than twice was the reader version of revision.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“And it only existed on Cosby’s show because Bill Cosby seemed obsessed with how white folk watched black folk watch us watch him.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“You took my paper smudged with tears and you read it out loud. You told me what worked in the essay, and what didn’t work. You asked me questions about word choice, pacing, and something you called political symbolism. You asked me what I was really trying to say with the essay and suggested I start with saying exactly that. You challenged me to use the rest of the essay to discover ideas and questions I didn’t already know and feel. “A good question anchored in real curiosity is much more important than a cliché or forced metaphor,” you told me.”
― Kiese Laymon, Heavy

“Blue and Gray veterans led the way in focusing public attention on the minute details of each battle, a move that tended to distract attention from larger questions of meaning. Few if any other wars have created among the public such a strange fascination with the concrete details of military tactics and strategy, and thus pride in knowing where and when General Daniel Sickles lost his leg at Gettysburg, but not in knowing when slaves were freed in the District of Columbia.”
― David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“Influential scholars since the mid-twentieth century have argued that the essential character of Ottoman modernity was reactive, imitative, defensive, and ultimately defective relative to the presumably more successful modernization projects of Germany, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and America, where while exemplifying and eventually monopolizing claims to modernity, also brought two world wars, the Holocaust, the nuclear immolation of Japanese cities, and the Cold War, among other worldwide cataclysms.”
― Michael Provence, The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
― Howard Zinn

“How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”
― Howard Zinn

“Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“Gowen finally gave up on December 13, 1889. He secluded himself in a Washington hotel room, pulled out a gun and, in morbid imitation of his old enemies, killed a mine official—himself.”
― Mark Bulik, The Sons of Molly Maguire: The Irish Roots of America's First Labor War

“Nowhere is the hostility of the Anglo-American tradition toward the dialectical more apparent, however, than in the widespread notion that the style of these works is obscure and cumbersome, indigestible, abstract-or, to sum it all up in a convenient catchword, Germanic. It can be admitted that it does not conform to the canons of clear and fluid journalistic writing taught in the schools. But what if those ideals of clarity and simplicity have come to serve a very different ideological purpose, in our present context, from the one Descartes had in mind? What if, in this period of the overproduction of printed matter and the proliferation of methods of quick reading, they were intended to speed the reader across a sentence in such a way that he can salute a readymade idea effortlessly in passing, without suspecting that real thought demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence?”
― Frederic Jameson

“Coming to terms with pain—and convincing themselves that transcending pain promises a moral reward—does a tremendous amount of work in organizing their identities. On their own, they create imaginative bridges between painful experiences and political identity in ways that make their suffering feel productive and honorable.”
― Jennifer M. Silva, We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America

“We need to challenge the lazy assumption that people aren't racist just because they don't say or do racist things.”
― Titania McGrath, Woke: A Guide to Social Justice

“Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“If a person's sense of self has been punctured, and they have not been willing or able to repair it, they may become intolerant of difference. They may confuse anxiety and vulnerability. They may exaggerate threat, overreact, seek the protection of bullies, and thereby become bullies themselves. They may lash out particularly cruely at people they love and desire, as the feeling of loving can remind them of the abusive parent that they once loved. They may never feel safe unless they have an unreasonable ammount of control over others, as in shunning. Shame, too, seems to be a driving force in traumatized behavior. Negotiation feels like a defeat, a reminder of the earlier violation. Giving in, adjusting, and changing feel life-threatening.”
― Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

“What began as a form of self-defense (I will reassert myself as the owner of my ideas, my identity, my name!) became, gradually, a form of self-release. By creating a crisis in my personal brand (the one I always denied I had), and by introducing a hefty dose of ridiculousness into the seriousness with which I once took my public persona, and by showing me how terribly grim it is to spend your life chasing clout, Other Naomi has left me with no choice but to loosen the grip on that performed and partitioned version of me.”
― Naomi Klein