Noah > Noah's Quotes

“The only problem with seeing people you know is that they know you.”
― Brent Runyon, The Burn Journals: A Memoir

“Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level or awareness you find yourself to be.”
― Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity

“But I was too restless to watch long; I'm too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours -- that's another matter.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“You mean that a Frenchman could share with a friend and yet not go to prison?’
‘Share? Do you mean unite? If both are of age and avoid public indecency, certainly.’
‘Will the law ever be that in England?’
‘I doubt it. England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“He never even thought of tenderness and emotion; his considerations about Durham remained cold. Durham didn't dislike him, he was sure. That was all he wanted. One thing at a time. He didn't so much as have hopes, for hope distracts, and he had a great deal to see to.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“Maurice was scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to the bottom of his suburban soul....”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“But it was the stupidity of passion, which would rather have nothing than a little.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“John [the father] kept saying, "You have a penis. That means you’re a boy." One day, Shannon noticed that her son had been in the bathroom an awfully long time and pushed the door open. "He had a pair of my best, sharpest sewing scissors poised, ready to cut. Penis in the scissors. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'This doesn’t belong here. So I’m going to cut it off.' I said, 'You can’t do that.' He said, 'Why not?' I said, 'Because if you ever want to have girl parts, they need that to make them.' I pulled that one right out of my ass. He handed me the scissors and said, 'Okay.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“In retrospect, it seems obvious that my research about parenting was also a means to subdue my anxieties about becoming a parent.... I grew up afraid of illness and disability, inclined to avert my gaze from anyone who was too different – despite all the ways I knew myself to be different. This book helped me kill that bigoted impulse, which I had always known to be ugly. The obvious melancholy in the stories I heard should, perhaps, have made me shy away from paternity, but it had the opposite effect.”
― Andrew Solomon

“The Internet," [Judy] Singer said, "is a prosthetic device for people who can't socialize without it." For anyone challenged by language and social rules, a communication system that does not operate in real time is a godsend.”
― Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

“Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah…it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.”
― Rumi

“I tell you I'm tired of hearing it. There ain't nothing that happens to a person that ain't that person. The world out there only does what you tell it to do. The world is happening to you the way it is happening because you're telling yourself the story that way. If you want to change the world so damn bad, Ida, then where you got to start is how it is you're looking at it.”
― Tom Spanbauer, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon

“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
― Gospel of Thomas