Emer Martin > Emer's Quotes

“It is our belief and our practice that in order to rebel and struggle, we need neither leaders, nor caudillos, nor messiahs, nor saviors. To struggle, we only need a little bit of disgrace, a good amount of dignity and a lot of organization. The rest is either useful for the collective or it isn’t,” reads the last communiqué.”
― sub commandante Marcos

“Hurt is a part of life. To be honest, I think hurt is a part of happiness, that our definition of happiness has gotten very narrow lately, very nervous, a little afraid of this brawling, fabulous, unpredictable world.”
― Julian Gough, Juno & Juliet

“Religion is the incinerator of the soul -”
― Emer Martin, Breakfast in Babylon

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any -”
― Alice Waters

“Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.”
― Anthony Powell

“Let the wild rumpus start!”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Seems to me it ain't the world that's so bad but what we're doing to it, and all I'm saying is: see what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love, baby - love. That's the secret.”
― Louis Armstrong

“Those in power don't need more power. They need criticism. They need a mirror.”
― historian Zeev Sternhell

“If you don't know your history, you will be controlled by its ghosts.”
― Emer Martin, Baby Zero

“Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?”
― James Joyce

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
― Howard Zinn

“The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels

“I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you're doing -- even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.”
― -Thelonious Monk

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I don't know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what?”
― Charles Bukowski

“Motto"

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“Nobody loves me but mama, and she may be jivin too.”
― B.B. King

“The concept of 'God' invented as a counter-concept of life... The concept of the 'beyond', the 'true world' invented in order to devaluate the only world there is...”
― Nietzche

“The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”
― Albert Camus

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
― Dorothy Parker

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“But man, proud man,
Dress'd in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.”
― William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.”
― Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape & Embers