Steph > Steph's Quotes

“The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.”
― Owen Barfield, Worlds Apart

“When the velocity of progress increases beyond a certain point, it becomes indistinguishable from crisis.”
― Owen Barfield, Night Operation

“Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.”
― Francis Schaeffer

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.”
― Maya Angelou, Conversations with Maya Angelou (Literary Conversations

“A fictional narrative is considered nuanced when it includes contradictions, but a narrative of trauma is ill-advised to do the same.”
― Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

“An angry man in cinema is Batman. An angry male musician is a member of Metallica. An angry male writer is Chekhov. An angry male politician is passionate, a revolutionary. He is a Donald Trump or a Bernie Sanders. The anger of men is a powerful enough tide to swing an election. But the anger of women? That has no place in government, so it has to flood the streets.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Anger is the privilege of the truly broken, and yet, I've never met a woman who was broken enough that she allowed herself to be angry.”
― Lyz Lenz, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“A woman is unruly if anyone has incorrectly decided that she’s too much of something, and if she, in turn, has chosen to believe that she’s just fine.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“She was smart enough to want more but tired enough to accept the way things were.”
― Roxane Gay, Difficult Women

“We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“sexist ideology will tend to discriminate between men and women, typically by alleging sex differences beyond what is known or could be known, and sometimes counter to our best current scientific evidence. Misogyny will typically differentiate between good women and bad ones, and punishes the latter. Overall, sexism and misogyny share a common purpose—to maintain or restore a patriarchal social order.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“Sexism is hence to bad science as misogyny is to moralism. Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“This also turns out to be a pretty good summary of the drug war, which, besides doing so much to erode our liberties and fill our prisons, served to distract us from reckoning the true toll of the opiates we happened to classify as legal.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“If alcohol fuels our Dionysian tendencies, caffeine nurtures the Apollonian.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants

“It is said that members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union would relax at the end of a day spent crusading against alcohol with their cherished “women’s tonics,” preparations whose active ingredient was laudanum—opium.”
― Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants