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#1

“You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.”
― Vandana Shiva

1889 likes

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#2

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

tags: criticism, humor, writing

2049 likes

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#3

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: spirituality

3616 likes

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#4

“Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.”
― Howard Nemerov

tags: humor, knowledge, literature, writing

2253 likes

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#5

“Don't die before you're dead. And if you do, let it be the good kind...when the only part of you that dies is who you were supposed to be.”
― Scott Stambach, The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko

8 likes

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#6

“If things went according to death notices, man would be absolutely perfect. There you find only first-class fathers, immaculate husbands, model children, unselfish and self-sacrificing mothers, grandparents mourned by all, businessmen in contrast with whom Francis of Assisi would seem an infinite egoist, generals dripping with kindness, humane prosecuting attorneys, almost holy munitions makers - in short, the earth seems to have been populated by a horde of wingless angels without one's having been aware of it.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, The Black Obelisk

tags: death, memorials

9 likes

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#7

“Suddenly revenge is so close he can actually taste it. It tastes like steak, rare.”
― Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed

tags: revenge

8 likes

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#8

“Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn’t do the first thing that came into their heads.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

tags: impulsive

2 likes

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#9

“Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

tags: constellation, definition, life, phenomena, vital

203 likes

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#10

“There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

tags: mortality

140 likes

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#11

“She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

tags: fluency, foreign, language

112 likes

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#12

“You are mine. I recognize you. We twist our souls around each other's miseries. It is that which makes us family.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

76 likes

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#13

“Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

57 likes

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#14

“She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

33 likes

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#15

“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

tags: humanity

1230 likes

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#16

“A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

683 likes

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#17

“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

tags: love

11975 likes

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#18

“Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me...I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

tags: become, elena, elena-ferrante, ferrante, lila

168 likes

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#19

“Even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina.”
― Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia

tags: classics, great-books

10 likes

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#20

“Kindness may look for something in return, but that doesn’t make it any less kind.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

49 likes

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#21

“I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”
― Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

tags: countries, love, loyalty, nationality, politics, war

331 likes

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#22

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

tags: loneliness, solitude

4550 likes

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#23

“Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.”
― Iris Murdoch

tags: art

80 likes

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#24

“The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green

58 likes

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#25

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

tags: animals, ethics, gandhi, morals

2570 likes

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#26

“The word 'catastrophe' is not permitted as long as there is danger of catastrophe turning to doom.”
― Christa Wolf, Accident: A Day's News

tags: apocalypse, catastrophe, chernobyl, doom, nuclear-power

1 likes

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#27

“I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.”
― Iris Murdoch

tags: feminism, ireland, irish, women

607 likes

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#28

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”
― Iris Murdoch

tags: flowers, joy

278 likes

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#29

“Ruth disapproved of this pointless industry. A triple-cleaned house, in her opinion, looked too much as if it had been licked all over by a cat's antiseptic tongue.”
― Fiona McFarlane

2 likes

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#30

“In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.”
― Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child

200 likes

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