Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
― Toni Morrison

“Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me-so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose
the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution,
but more usually
we must do battle where we are standing.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Nothing should be made by man's labour which is not worth making, or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers.”
― William Morris

“Abolish these categories of pain
(or is it love)
Let it all be one pain
Pain swallows itself, dies like a star.”
― Alice Notley, Disobedience

“manuscripts don't burn" - "(рукописи не горят)”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
― Audre Lorde

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Revolution is not a one time event.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Repeat after me, Mr. Black: I do believe in commas. I do, I do.”
― Jaida Jones

“To fear love is to fear life, and those whose fear life are already three parts dead...”
― Anton Chekhov

“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”
― George Saunders

“I daresay it seems foolish; perhaps all our earthly trials will appear foolish to us after a while; perhaps they seem so now to angels. But we are ourselves, you know, and this is now, not some time to come, a long, long way off. And we are not angels, to be comforted by seeing the ends for which everything is sent.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters

“Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used--not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster but I have not felt exactly what other women feel, or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“I told you from the beginning—as soon as I could—I told you I was afraid of myself." There was a piteous pleading in the low murmur in which Deronda turned his ear only. Her face afflicted him too much. "I felt a hatred in me that was always working like an evil spirit—contriving things. Everything I could do to free myself came into my mind; and it got worse—all things got worse. That is why I asked you to come to me in town. I thought then I would tell you the worst about myself. I tried. But I could not tell everything.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“I cannot suppose there is anybody here who would think it either a good life, or an amusing one, to sit with one's hands before one doing nothing - to live like a gentleman, as fools call it.”
― William Morris, Useful Work versus Useless Toil

“Do not be deceived by the outside appearance of order in our plutocratic society. It fares with it as it does with the older norms of war, that there is an outside look of quite wonderful order about it; how neat and comforting the steady march of the regiment; how quiet and respectable the sergeants look; how clean the polished cannon ... the looks of adjutant and sergeant as innocent-looking as may be, nay, the very orders for destruction and plunder are given with a quiet precision which seems the very token of a good conscience; this is the mask that lies before the ruined cornfield and the burning cottage, and mangled bodies, the untimely death of worthy men, the desolated home.”
― William Morris

“If others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.”
― William Morris, News from Nowhere