Jo > Jo's Quotes

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Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“According to this new evidence, most of our thinking (including our moral judgment) is not a pristinely rational process in the traditional sense, and therefore reasoning is not a bloodless, emotionless, purely formal logical process. Instead, we need an intact and functioning emotional apparatus in order for our reason to have any possibility of operating appropriately in a given situation.”
― Mark Johnson, Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science

“This was a man’s war. If only I were a man. I would rip off the lips that had curled around lies and accusations. Tear out a heart that pumped only poison. Pluck out those eyes and crush them in my palms until the poison ran out over my fingers and onto the ground, staining it red. Like the wise witches who could read the future in a black pond or candlelit mirror, maybe in that thick pool of poison I could see the horrors in all their eyes. Maybe then I could understand war.”
― Valya Dudycz Lupescu, The Silence of Trees

“Nabokov, Heinrich von Kleist, Raymond Carver, Jane Bowles, James Baldwin, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant—the list goes on and on. They are the teachers to whom I go, the authorities I consult, the models that still help to inspire me with the energy and courage it takes to sit down at a desk each day and resume the process of learning, anew, to write.”
― Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“the truth is that grammar is always interesting, always useful. Mastering the logic of grammar contributes, in a mysterious way that again evokes some process of osmosis, to the logic of thought.”
― Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

“You didn’t judge people for caving under pressure; you judged them for those few times when they were lucky enough to have any choice at all.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife