Saskia > Saskia's Quotes

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
― Simone Weil

“All sins are attempts to fill voids.”
― Simone Weil

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
― Simone Weil

“A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“Love is not consolation. It is light.”
― Simone Weil

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
― Simone Weil

“If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.”
― Simone Weil

“Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.”
― Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy

“We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.”
― Simone Weil

“We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.”
― Simone Weil

“Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.”
― Simone Weil

“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”
― Simone Weil

“Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. ”
― Simone Weil

“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.”
― Simone Weil

“Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him.
Every being cries out silently to be read differently.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?”
― Simone Weil

“I can, therefore I am.”
― Simone Weil

“You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“The capacity to pay attention to an afflicted person is something very rare, very difficult; it is nearly a miracle. It is a miracle. Nearly all those who believe they have this capacity do not. Warmth, movements of the heart, and pity are not sufficient.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“A mind enclosed in language is in prison.”
― Simone Weil

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”
― Simone Weil

“In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

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― Simone Weil

“The Quiet Girls"

Were we never wolves? No, we never were.
We never let ourselves be lured into a lair.
We never licked honey off an eyetooth

just for the sweet. We never swallowed
our own blood with the honey. We were
neither animal nor stone. We were ephemeral,

motes in light, breath in winter. Drifting
was safe travel; we knew it then, and we were right.
The earth slowed its spinning and we stayed on.

Trenches yawned, and we skirted them. We survived
the meteor shower—no fragments fell on us.
Still we float like spores, always aloft and away.”
― CATHERINE PIERCE

“The Geek Girls

Were we never robins? No, we never were.
No one recognized spring in us, though great elms
grew inside our rib cages. They pushed their spiny

tips outward, so that we felt small stabbings daily,
but they never broke through. So we were never spring,
never foliage. We were the small and oddball beasts:

anoles, silverfish, shrimp. We moved fast and sideways,
upways, allways but straight. We heard of nights lit
with lightning bugs and cigarettes. With rumflame

and tonguefire. We needed none of it. The nights were
black puzzleboxes and we solved them. It was easy—
in the darkness, our minds sparked like flint.”
― Catherine Pierce

“This Is Not an Elegy

At sixteen, I was illegal and brilliant,
my fingernails chewed to half-moons.
I took off my clothes in a late March
field. I had secret car wrecks,
secret hysteria. I opened my mouth
to swallow stars. In backseats
I learned the alchemy of guilt, lust,
and distance. I was unformed and total.
I swore like a sailor. But slowly the cops
stopped coming around. The heat lifted
its palms. The radio lost some teeth.

Now I see the landscape behind me
as through a Claude glass—
tinted deeper, framed just so, bits
of gilt edging the best parts.
I see my unlined face, a thousand
film stars behind the eyes. I was
every murderess, every whip-
thin alcoholic, every heroine
with the silver tongue. Always young
Paul Newman’s best girl. Always
a lightning sky behind each kiss.

Some days I watch myself
in the third person, speak to her
in the second. I say: I will
meet you in sleep. I will know you
by your stillness and your shaking.
By your second-hand gown.
By your bruises left by mouths
since forgotten. This is not
an elegy because I cannot bear
for it to be. It is only a tree branch
against the window. It is only a cherry
tomato slowly reddening in the garden.
I will put it in my mouth. It will
be sweet, and you will swallow.”
― Catherine Pierce, Famous Last Words

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.”
― Neil Gaiman, M Is for Magic

“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master-and that is what Auguste Rodin was-can look at an old woman, protray her exactly as she is...and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be...and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart...no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired-but it does to them.”
― Robert Heinlein