Casey Sparwasser > Casey's Quotes

“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I am I, and I wish I weren't.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Back then, and even now, I wonder: Am I “empowered”? If you have to hide your hypersensitivity, are you really a “strong woman”? Sometimes another voice enters my head, shooing these thoughts aside. This one tells me that the only really good performance is one where you make yourself vulnerable while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone. I liken it to having an intense, hyper-real dream, where you step off a cliff but don’t fall to your death. Though”
― Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band

“There was a sense that we were there to get things done very quickly, what James Baldwin had called America’s “funny sense of time,” as if “with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“Thinking too much can make it difficult to act. If you just do it, then it is done. But if you give in to your thinking, your mind will get in the way, telling you “you can’t,” “you shouldn’t,” “you don’t want to.” In that case, get up early the next morning and just do the thing you’ve been putting off. If you give yourself time to start thinking about it, inaction will take hold again.”
― Haemin Sunim, Love for Imperfect Things: How to Accept Yourself in a World Striving for Perfection

“Don’t call me that,” I said. “You don’t know what it means.” “Sure I do,” he said. “You’ve got black all over your face, like a nigger!” For the rest of the afternoon—for the rest of the summer—I was Nigger. I’d answered to it a thousand times before with indifference. If anything, I’d been amused and thought Shawn was clever. Now it made me want to gag him. Or sit him down with a history book, as long as it wasn’t the one Dad still kept in the living room, under the framed copy of the Constitution.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Take women’s suffrage. If being a woman denies you the right to vote, you ipso facto cannot grant it to yourself. And you certainly cannot vote for your right to vote. If men control all the mechanisms that exclude women from voting as well as the mechanisms that can reverse that exclusion, women must call on men for justice.”
― Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

“A marriage or any relationship between partners is meant to be created and then re-created. It is an edifice a couple builds until the day the edifice can no longer hold them and they must bring it down and start again from scratch. And without any of the old assumptions. It’s exactly like Carolyn Heilbrun says, all good marriages are remarriages.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine

“This is a hard question. But as women we have a right to ask the hard questions. The only way I have ever understood, broken free, emerged, healed, forgiven, flourished, and grown powerful is by asking the hardest questions and then living into the answers through opening up to my own terror and transmuting it into creativity. I have gotten nowhere by retreating into hand-me-down sureties or resisting the tensions that truth ignited.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine

“Each outbreak pitted two groups that had more in common with each other than either of them realized. Both sides were made up of rural and small-town people who had traveled far in search of the American Dream, both relegated to the worst jobs by industrialists who pitted one group against the other. Each side was struggling to raise its families in a cold, fast, alien place far from their homelands and looked down upon by the earlier, more sophisticated arrivals. They were essentially the same people except for the color of their skin, and many of them arrived into these anonymous receiving stations at around the same time, one set against the other and unable to see the commonality of their mutual plight.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“As often happens with immigrant groups, some of the old-timers would have preferred to shut the door after they got there to protect their own uncertain standing.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“Saving the planet and eradicating inequality is a tall order for an English lit major. But maybe she can start in her own backyard. Maybe she can start by not tolerating little comments from some out-of-touch madman in a bow tie. You tell me: What makes him any different than the rest?”
― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People