E > E's Quotes

“Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.
And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.

But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!.

Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“Rorschach's Journal: October 12th, 1985

Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.

The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown.

The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll look down and whisper "No.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“Our goal should not be to reshape masculinity but to eliminate it. The goal is liberation from the masculinity trap.”
― Robert Jensen

“I could settle for being a man, or I could struggle to become a human being.”
― Robert Jensen

“MacKinnon captures this is in her succinct lesson on the grammar of pornography and male dominance: 'Man fucks woman; subject verb object.”
― Robert Jensen, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity

“Those four effects described above—shaping a male-dominant view of sexuality, initiating victims, contributing to difficulty in separating sexual fantasy and reality, and providing a training manual for abusers—are at work just as much with men who have not engaged in activities that meet the legal definition of rape. Here we have to let go of a comforting illusion—that there is some clear line between men who rape and men who don't, between the bad guys and the good guys.”
― Robert Jensen, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity

“He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father's books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences, he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I wonder if he had a Cathy and who she was.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Adam fluttered like a bewildered bee confused by too many flowers.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or the breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Do not seek water, get thirst.”
― Rumi

“In her fury she'd broken into Valencian, indicating the deepest possible roots in the land. I was impressed with how deeply she was from here, in a way I could never imagine being from anywhere, not even my home town.”
― Elisabeth Eaves, Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents

“It was the inverse of an island in the sea.”
― Elisabeth Eaves, Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents

“Time is merely a feature of our memories and expectations.”
― Ibn Sina

“Darkness fell like a wet sponge.”
― John Ashbery, Some Trees

“God will not have his work made manifest by cowards”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“Pay close attention. Listen carefully. Let's look at what happens when fear is in charge.

With fear in charge, you can never fully relax, let your guard down, be your true self. You can't open up because you are afraid of how people will respond if they were to meet the real you. When fear is in charge, you simply cannot take that chance. Fear will not allow honesty, fear despises spontaneity, and fear refuses to believe in you. Fear may mean well, but it ruins everything by overprotecting you, insisting that you stay hidden and keep a low profile, that your time is coming....sometime later.

Fear is bold, but insists that you be timid. Take a chance and there will be hell to pay: fear will call on its dear friend, shame, to meet you on the other side of your risk taking, to tell you what you should not have done. Fear will trip you, tackle you, smother you, do whatever it takes to cause you to hesitate, to stop you. In this way fear is fearless.”
― Thom Rutledge, Embracing Fear: How to Turn What Scares Us into Our Greatest Gift – Practical Tools for Understanding and Accepting Anxiety, Depression, and Procrastination

“With all the risk and danger television sprays at us each day like tear gas, it occurs to me they should simply open each evening's show by saying, "Welcome to the Channel Two News; we're very surprised you made it through another day.”
― Thom Rutledge

“We fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noises.”
― Cyril Connolly

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that, if there are at least seven thousand wants to speak, there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“The universe is a continuous web. Touch it at any point and the whole web quivers.”
― Stanley Kunitz

“Can we listen to each other the way veins listen to blood?”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.”
― Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred

“Do anything totally and it is finished; you will not carry a psychological memory of it. Do anything incompletely and it hangs with you.”
― Osho

“Tantra acceptance is total; it doesn't split you.”
― Osho