✩ jo > ✩'s Quotes

“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”
― James Baldwin

“Time is not duration but intensity; time is the beat and the interval [...]”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea

“Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.”
― Maya Angelou

“What brought you here isn't your fault. We human beings have to live each day to its fullest and do our best in whatever environment we find ourselves in. There's no need to feel any shame just because your "fullest" and "best" look different from those of others.”
― Naoki Higashida, Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man's Voice from the Silence of Autism

“I understand that I had engaged seriously with someone who only engaged theoretically, and I was so humiliated by this that we never spoke again.”
― Raven Leilani, Luster

“...the reason is that when we look at nature, we receive a sort of permission to be alive in this world...”
― Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: the Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

“I’ve made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.”
― Raven Leilani, Luster

“You have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”
― James Baldwin

“I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm. Hold up your head when the tears come, when you are mocked, insulted, questioned, threatened, when they tell you you are nothing, when your body is reduced to openings. The journey will be longer than you imagined, trauma will find you again and again. Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift. Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom. Fight because it is your life. Not anyone else’s. I did it, I am here. Looking back, all the ones who doubted or hurt or nearly conquered me faded away, and I am the only one standing. So now, the time has come. I dust myself off, and go on.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir