Shadon | happinessbooked > Shadon | happinessbooked 's Quotes

“Holding anger is a poison...It eats you from inside...We think that by hating someone we hurt them...But hatred is a curved blade...and the harm we do to others...we also do to ourselves.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“We teach girls shame. “Close your legs. Cover yourself.” We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“My own definition is a feminist is a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better. All of us, women and men, must do better.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“If you are disgusted by what you see, and if you feel the fire coursing through your veins, then it's up to you. You don't have to be the leader of a global movement or a household name. It can be as small scale as chipping away at the warped power relations in your workplace. It can be passing on knowledge and skills to those who wouldn't access them otherwise. It can be creative. It can be informal. It can be your job. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as you're doing something.”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“The mess we are living in is a deliberate one. If it was created by people, it can be dismantled by people, and it can be rebuilt in a way that serves all, rather than a selfish, hoarding few.”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“East, West, South or North makes little difference. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey, a journey within. If you travel within, you’ll travel the whole wide world and beyond.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Grief is a swallow,' he said. 'One day you wake up and you think it's gone, but it's only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.”
― Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

“All humans make mistakes. What determines a person's character aren't the mistakes we make. It's how we take those mistakes and turn them into lessons rather than excuses.”
― Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us

“it’s very simple. Being a feminist means believing that every woman should be able to use her voice and pursue her potential, and that women and men should all work together to take down the barriers and end the biases that still hold women back.”
― Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

“My story, told honestly and matter-of-factly, is the best weapon I have against terrorism, and I plan on using it until those terrorists are put on trial. There is still so much that needs to be done. World leaders and particularly Muslim religious leaders need to stand up and protect the oppressed.”
― Nadia Murad, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State

“People's reaction to me is sometimes "Uch, I just don't like her. I hate how she thinks she is so great." But it's not that I think I'm so great. I just don't hate myself. I do idiotic things all the time and I say crazy stuff I regret, but I don't let everything traumatize me. And the scary thing I have noticed is that some people really feel uncomfortable around women who don't hate themselves. So that's why you need to be a little bit brave.”
― Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me?

“I will leave you with one last piece of advice, which is: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. And if you don’t got it? Flaunt it. ’Cause what are we even doing here if we’re not flaunting it?”
― Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me?

“People talk about confidence without ever bringing up hard work. That’s a mistake. I know I sound like some dour older spinster on Downton Abbey who has never felt a man’s touch and whose heart has turned to stone, but I don’t understand how you could have self-confidence if you don’t do the work... I have never, ever, ever, met a high confident person and successful person who is not what a movie would call a 'workaholic.' Because confidence is like respect; you have to earn it.”
― Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me?

“Courtney replied that Roxane Gay warned against the idea of playing ‘privilege Olympics’ and wrote in Bad Feminist that privilege is relative and contextual, and I agree, Yazz, I mean, where does it all end? is Obama less privileged than a white hillbilly growing up in a trailer park with a junkie single mother and a jailbird father? is a severely disabled person more privileged than a Syrian asylum-seeker who’s been tortured? Roxane argues that we have to find a new discourse for discussing inequality”
― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

“Every true love and friendship is a story of unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“ANY REAL CHANGE IMPLIES THE breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free—he has set himself free—for higher dreams, for greater privileges. All men have gone through this, go through it, each according to his degree, throughout their lives. It is one of the irreducible facts of life. And remembering this, especially since I am a Negro, affords me almost my only means of understanding what is happening in the minds and hearts of white Southerners today.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

“By going beyond solidarity, individualised lifestyle changes, I saw the incredible transformation that comes from building community power. By building this power, we can see that settling for just making better choices within a harmful system is not enough; it is only when we come together that we can transform the system itself.”
― Mikaela Loach, It's Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World

“The sickness that is white supremacy is killing us all, some more quickly than others.”
― Mikaela Loach, It's Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World

“How is it that we already have so many solutions to the climate crisis that don't compromise human rights or justice, but the only solutions being seriously considered are the ones that do?”
― Mikaela Loach, It's Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World

“Why is it that ending capitalism, whiteness and living in a world where all of us can live in dignity and safety can be harder to conceptualise than imagining the end of the world?”
― Mikaela Loach, It's Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World

“... oppression is in the foundations of many of the systems that exist today and therefore simply changing who is at the top does not fix the fact that the system itself requires there to be people at the bottom.”
― Mikaela Loach, It's Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World

“A new world is utterly reliant on us being able to see the humanity in all people, even if those people can't see our humanity. It's a hard pill to swallow.”
― Mikaela Loach, It's Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World

“Capitalism requires there to be someone at the bottom to exploit from. It requires inequality. We can never have collective liberation under a system like this.”
― Mikaela Loach, It's Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World

“Consumers' cannot stop climate change because capitalism is not compatible with a climate-just world. But active citizens CAN. Movements CAN. WE CAN when we challenge and disrupt these systems, rather than limiting our power and actions to those which are within it.”
― Mikaela Loach, It's Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World

“War and whiteness organize the world. They tell you what you can imagine and what you can’t: what stories you can revel in and what stories get burnt up into feathers of ash and taken away by the wind. Only the war stories of white people seem to matter. They offer a line through: a beginning and an end.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

“Britain’s comfortable indulgences - its infrastructure, its economy, its food supplies - depend on modern slavery, its wealth and resources on thousands of brown and Black bodies murdered during empire. Britain lives in terrible denial, I know now, of a history it can’t admit to. And it survives that denial by indicating to people of colour, very subtly, very passively, that they shouldn’t think of themselves as real. Because if no one real was hurt, then no real harm has been done.”
― Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma