Maureen > Maureen's Quotes

“Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it”
― James Baldwin

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

“There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“When someone shows you who they are believe them the first time.”
― Maya Angelou

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?”
― David Byrne, How Music Works

“Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

“You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live
unblinded?
How much of this pain
can I use?”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”
― James Baldwin

“Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.”
― Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“There is a timbre of voice
that comes from not being heard
and knowing / you are not being
heard / noticed only
by others / not heard
for the same reason.”
― Audre Lorde, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”
― Maya Angelou

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“Perhaps I am just a coward who loves to laugh at life better than I do cry with it. But when I do get to crying, boy, I can roll a mean tear.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.”
― Richard Wright, Native Son

“Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I have slept with you all night long while the dark earth spins with the living and the dead, and on waking suddenly in the midst of the shadow my arm encircled your waist. Neither night nor sleep could separate us.”
― Pablo Neruda, Love Poems

“A man who limits his interests limits his life.”
― Vincent Price

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“What have you done when you have bested a fool?”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning