Jane Morrison > Jane's Quotes

“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done--then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“Becoming aware of the intense suffering of billions of animals, and of our own participation in that suffering, can bring up painful emotions: sorrow and grief for the animals; anger at the injustice and deception of the system; despair at the enormity of the problem; fear that trusted authorities and institutions are, in fact, untrustworthy; and guilt for having contributed to the problem. Bearing witness means choosing to suffer. Indeed, empathy is literally 'feeling with.' Choosing to suffer is particularly difficult in a culture that is addicted to comfort--a culture that teaches that pain should be avoided whenever possible and that ignorance is bliss. We can reduce our resistance to witnessing by valuing authenticity over personal pleasure, and integration over ignorance.”
― Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism

“When you are an advocate, you're seen as taking the moral high ground, which can cause others to feel morally inferior and defensive for not having made the same choice you did.
For this reason, it's important to frame your message as empowering rather than blaming.”
― Melanie Joy, Strategic Action for Animals: A Handbook on Strategic Movement Building, Organizing, and Activism for Animal Liberation

“One witch you can laugh at. Three you can burn. But what do you do with a hundred?”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“I am terrified and I am terrible. I am fearful and I am something to be feared.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“They always end up alone in the stories—witches, I mean—living in the woods or mountains or locked in towers. I suppose it would take a brave man to love a witch, and most men are cowards.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“If you weep for all the sorrows in this world, in the end you will have no eyes.”
― Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

“Death is lighter than a feather. Duty, heavier than a mountain.”
― Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“Democracy is fragile. You have to fight for every bit, every law, every safeguard, every institution, every story. You must know how dangerous it is to suffer even the tiniest cut. This is why I say to us all: we must hold the line.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: A Nobel Laureate's Fight Against Authoritarianism -- Includes an Introduction by Amal Clooney

“So how do you stand up to a dictator? By embracing values, defined early—they’re the subtitles of the chapters you’ve read: honesty, vulnerability, empathy, moving away from emotions, embracing your fear, believing in the good. You can’t do it alone. You have to create a team, strengthen your area of influence. Then connect the bright spots and weave a mesh together. Avoid thinking in terms of 'us against them.' Stand in someone else’s shoes. And do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
― Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator

“the Nightingale pressed
closer against the thorn, and the thorn touched her heart, and a
fierce pang of pain shot through her. Bitter, bitter was the pain, and
wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is
perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Nightingale and the Rose

“In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“At every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.”
― Paulo Coelho

“The choice to focus on the good is itself
a way to defy the evil.”
― Jarod K. Anderson

“The land knows you, even when you are lost.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“It’s easy to look at the contours of a forest and feel a bone deep love for nature. It’s less easy to remember that the contours of your own body represent the exact same nature. The pathways of your mind. Your dreams, dark and strange as sprouts curling beneath a flat rock. Your regret, bitter as the citrus rot of old cut grass. It’s the same as the nature you make time to love. That you practice loving. The forest. The meadow. The sweeping arm of a galaxy. You are as natural as any postcard landscape and deserve the same love.”
― Jarod K. Anderson, Field Guide to the Haunted Forest

“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“My heart can feel like an elephant who is feeling dread and has an exceptional memory and naturally possesses something valuable that might be hunted, poached, wasted.”
― Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”
― George Orwell

“if people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and injust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they will never be afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should- so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre