Robin > Robin's Quotes

“We are, always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also all the time exploring possibilities.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, A Simpler Way

“And for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“We were together. I forget the rest.”
― Walt Whitman

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”
― Mary Oliver

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. ”
― James Baldwin

“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house”
― Audre Lorde

“I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
― Gaston Bachelard , The Poetics of Space

“To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.”
― Gaston Bachelard

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

“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”
― Haruki Marukami

“All education is with a purpose and that purpose can only be political, for we either educate to liberate or we educate to dominate.”
― Paolo Freire

“The world is not finished. It is always in the process of becoming.”
― Paolo Freire

“Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“There's no such thing as neutral education. Education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.”
― Richard Shaull, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

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

“The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.”
― Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change

“Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“How prettily we swim. Not in water, not on land, but in love.”
― Gertrude Stein

“Nothing is ever solved, Solving is an illusion. There are moments of spontaneous brightness, when the mind appears emancipated, but this is more epiphany.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“Our quiet rage gives us wings, the possibility to negotiate the gears winding backwards uniting all time.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“You don’t see things like that. You feel them, as in all important things; they arrive, they come into your dreams.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“Every Saturday I would go to the library and choose my books for the week. One late-autumn morning, despite menacing clouds, I bundled up and walked as always, past the peach orchards, the pig farm and the skating rink to the fork in the road that led to our sole library. The sight of so many books never failed to excite me, rows and rows of books with multicolored spines. I’d spent an inordinate amount of time choosing my stack of books that day, with the sky growing more ominous. At first, I wasn’t worried as I had long legs and was a pretty fast walker, but then it became apparent that there was no way I was going to beat the impending storm. It grew colder, the winds picked up, followed by heavy rains, then pelting hail. I slid the books under my coat to protect them, I had a long way to go; I stepped in puddles and could feel the icy water permeate my ankle socks. When I finally reached home my mother shook her head with sympathetic exasperation, prepared a hot bath and made me go to bed. I came down with bronchitis and missed several days of school. But it had been worth it, for I had my books, among them The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, Half Magic and The Dog of Flanders. Wonderful books that I read over and over, only accessible to me through our library.”
― Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

“Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who they are so that they can more wisely build the future.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
― June Jordan

“There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense of the world we live in; writing is a way to clarify, to interpret, to reinvent. We may want our work to be recognized, but that is not the reason we write. We do not write because we must; we always have a choice. We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life. With words we experience our deepest understandings of what it means to be intimate. We communicate to connect, to know community.”
― bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work

“Without community, there is no liberation.”
― Audre Lorde

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
― audre lorde

“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.”
― Audre Lorde

“I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side”
― Audre Lorde