Pioetics > Pioetics's Quotes

“This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to us like a fugitive bird unable to fly, unable to land.”
― Elaine Scarry

“How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.”
― Elaine Scarry

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.”
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

“Beauty always takes place in the particular.”
― Elaine Scarry

“We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it’s very healthy, because it’s the only place where we never lie. At night we don’t lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life.”
― Helene Cixous

“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.”
― Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

“You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.”
― Helene Cixous

“When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.”
― Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

“Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.”
― Helene Cixous

“She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics - such as: if there are less than 5 million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think, "what a lazy, good-for-nothing animal," they are, in fact, working very, very hard.”
― Kate Atkinson

“The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.”
― Kate Atkinson, Human Croquet

“Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“They said love made you strong, but in Louise's opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn't get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.”
― Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn

“I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.”
― Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum

“Love was the hardest thing. Don't let anyone ever tell you different.”
― Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn

“Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.”
― Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

“Sometimes,' Sylvie said, 'one can mistake gratitude for love.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.”
― Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog

“Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.”
― Kate Atkinson

“If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

“Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“Sylvie’s knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, ‘The sign that one has acquired one’s learning from reading novels rather than an education…”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.”
― Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

“It wasn't that [he] believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories