Rachel Person > Rachel's Quotes

“When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling.

Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“And for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live just by their presence.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“Men like us are good and proud and strong...if we had a faith, a God, nothing could undermine us. But we had nothing, we had to learn everything, and living for honor alone has its weaknesses...”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“To begin with, poor people´s memory is less nourished than that of a rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughtout lives that are grey and featureless.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“There's always been war," said Veillard. "But people quickly get accustomed to peace. So they think it's normal. No, war is what's normal.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“Oh no, oh no,' she said through her tears, 'I'm so in love with love,' and, intelligent and outstanding in so many ways, perhaps just because she truly was intelligent and outstanding, she rejected the world as it was.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?”
― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

“Most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.”
― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
― Richard Shaull, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people--they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“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

“The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence;… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause--the cause of liberation.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

“The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.”
― Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

“Human kindness is deeply subversive to totalitarian creeds, which seek to thwart all compassion toward those deemed unworthy of moral consideration, those branded as internal or external enemies.”
― Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

“Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.”
― Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think — it is stranger than we can think. — Werner Heisenberg”
― A.C. Weisbecker, Cosmic Banditos: The Cult Classic

“Accepting death doesn't mean you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, "Why do people die?" and "Why is this happening to me?" Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory