Iris > Iris's Quotes

“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”
― Frantz Fanon

“Inside the word "emergency" is "emerge"; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“To judge is to believe that a person is capable of doing better. It's to know that people can change their behavior, even quite radically in response to what is expected of them.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help

“Paul Goodman famously wrote, “Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

“Howard Zinn wrote in 1988, in what now seems like a lost world before so many political upheavals and technological changes arrived, “As this century draws to a close, a century packed with history, what leaps out from that history is its utter unpredictability.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

“Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible. Perfectionists can find fault with anything, and no one has higher standards in this regard than leftists.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

“Trying to help is at best useless and at worst damaging; but to stop trying to help is to give up on humanity. Humanitarians are condescending hypocrites, but they are the best of us.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help

“(If you are reading this story out loud, force a listener to reveal a devastating secret, then open the nearest window to the street and scream it as loudly as you are able.)”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

“The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“Fire, brimstone and impending apocalypse have always had great success in the pulpit, and the apocalypse is always easier to imagine than the strange circuitous routes to what actually comes next.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

“Giving up alcohol is an asceticism for the modern do-gooder, drinking being, like sex, a pleasure that humans have always indulged in, involving a loss of self-control, the renunciation of which marks the renouncer as different and separate from other people.

To drink, to get drunk, is to lower yourself on purpose for the sake of good fellowship. You abandon yourself, for a time, to life and fate. You allow yourself to become stupider and less distinct. Your boundaries become blurry: you open your self and feel connected to people around you. You throw off your moral scruples, and suspect it was only those scruples that prevented the feeling of connection before. You feel more empathy for your fellow, but at the same time, because you are drunk, you render yourself unable to help him; so, to drink is to say, I am a sinner, I have chosen not to help.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help

“Excessive altruism tended to preclude real intimacy with another person, because intimacy was a business of giving and receiving, but the overly moral person could not receive, only give.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help

“Giving without expectation of return was not thought to be a higher, more selfless act; quite the contrary, it was aggressive, it set the giver up as superior to the recipient, causing the recipient to lose face; it imposed a burden of gratitude without permitting the relief of reciprocation. Because a gift contained in itself something of the essence of the giver, a gift gave him power over the beneficiary. In some societies a gift retained, rather than passed along, could cause serious harm to the recipient—even death. In some ancient languages, the word “gift” had a second meaning: poison.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help

“An extreme sense of duty seems to many people to be a kind of disease – a masochistic need for self-punishment, perhaps, or a kind of depression that makes its sufferer feel unworthy of pleasure...In fact, some do-gooders are happy, some are not. The happy ones are happy for the same reasons anyone is happy – love, work, purpose. It is do-gooders’ unhappiness that is different – a reaction not only to humiliation and lack of love and the other usual stuff, but also to knowing that the world is filled with misery, and that most people do not really notice or care, and that, try as they might, they cannot do much about either of those things. What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence. They lack that happy blindness that allows most people, most of the time, to shut their minds to what is unbearable. Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on knowing, that everything they do affects other people, and that sometimes (though not always) their joy is purchased with other people’s joy. And, remembering that, they open themselves to a sense of unlimited, crushing responsibility.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help

“I once heard a story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he told her family and they had her hauled her off to a sanatorium. I don’t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly they take you away from the known world for wanting it?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

“When the baby cries, she could be hungry or thirsty or angry or cranky or sick or sleepy or paranoid or jealous or she had planned something but it went horribly awry. So you'll need to take care of that, when it happens.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“God/Dios, que desde luego no puede ser más que white/blanco, nos libre de tener jamás una aspiración diferente o una idea original que nos pueda alejar del ansiado dream/sueño del whitening/blanqueamiento total.”
― Federico Navarrete, Alfabeto del racismo mexicano