Sue > Sue's Quotes

“Why does one feel so different at night? Why is it so exciting to be awake when everybody else is asleep? Late—it is very late! And yet every moment you feel more and more wakeful, as though you were slowly, almost with every breath, waking up into a new, wonderful, far more thrilling and exciting world than the daylight one. And what is this queer sensation that you’re a conspirator? Lightly, stealthily you move about your room. You take something off the dressing-table and put it down again without a sound. And everything, even the bedpost, knows you, responds, shares your secret…
You're not very fond of your room by day. You never think about it. You're in and out, the door opens and slams, the cupboard creaks. You sit down on the side of your bed, change your shoes and dash out again. A dive down to the glass, two pins in your hair, powder your nose and off again. But now–it's suddenly dear to you. It's a darling little funny room. It's yours. Oh, what a joy it is to own things! Mine–my own!”
― Katherine Mansfield, At the Bay

“If everyone stopped pretending
capitalism would drop dead”
― Carl-John X Veraja

“The trouble with human beings is not really that they love themselves too much; they ought to love themselves more. The trouble is simply that they don’t love others enough.

"The End of Anthropocentrism?”
― Mary Midgley

“What great philosophers do for us is not to hand out such an all-purpose system. It is to light up and clarify some special aspect of life, to supply conceptual tools which will do a certain necessary kind of work. Wide though that area of work may be, it is never the whole, and all ideas lose their proper power when they are used out of their appropriate context. That is why one great philosopher does not necessarily displace another, why there is room for all of them and a great many more whom we do not have yet.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“As Darwin pointed out in The Origin of Species (opening pages of chapter three), the 'struggle for existence' can often be described just as well as a mutual dependence. And harmless coexistence as parts of the same eco-sphere is also a very common relation. . . . Among social creatures, positive gregariousness, a liking for each other's company, is the steady, unnoticed background for the conflicts.”
― Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion

“The world in which the kestrel moves, the world that it sees, is, and always will be, entirely beyond us. That there are such worlds all around us is an essential feature of our world.”
― Mary Midgley, Beast and Man

“The notable thing about his story here is not its atheism but its fatalism. The drama that it presents of helpless humans enslaved by a callous fate-figure is, of course, not new and, like all such myths, it conveys not just meaninglessness but a positive, sinister meaning – the presence of an active oppressor.”
― Mary Midgley, The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

“When did you first fall in love?"

"I think, I first fell in love
when I was in fifth grade
with this boy who kept his glass ruler in the sunlight
and made rainbows on my desk with it.”
― Saiber, Stardust and Sheets

“And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it - although I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand.

What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch