Jacob > Jacob's Quotes

“Everything I think I can't say 'cause it'd come out fucking emo, like, if I were to say what I've been thinking all day, every day: I don't know if I can go on like this forever; or, I'm also always thinking, it shouldn't be this hard just to have a brain. Everyone has a brain.”
― Elissa Washuta, My Body Is a Book of Rules

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde

“Nobody gets to have it all, not even Donald Trump. You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want.”
― Pam Houston, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“So, if this were indeed my Final Hour, these would be my words to you. I would not claim to pass on any secret of life, for there is none, or any wisdom except the passionate plea of caring ... Try to feel, in your heart's core, the reality of others. This is the most painful thing in the world, probably, and the most necessary. In times of personal adversity, know that you are not alone. Know that although in the eternal scheme of things you are small, you are also unique and irreplaceable, as are all of your fellow humans everywhere in the world. Know that your commitment is above all to life itself.”
― Margaret Laurence

“I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.”
― Gloria Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas

“There is no justice we don't make daily like bread and love.”
― Marge Piercy

“Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

“It also seems honorable that another woman would value motherhood over all my priorities. But I do not believe that I am selfish and she is not. There are women who chose motherhood for selfish reasons. There are mothers who act selfishly even if they chose motherhood in a burst of altruistic love. Selfishness and generosity are not relegated to particular life choices and if generosity is a worthy life goal--and I believe it is--perhaps our task is to choose the path that for us creates its best opportunity.”
― Pam Houston, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
― audre lorde

“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.”
― Audre Lorde

“But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.”
― Audre Lorde

“...and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”
― Audre Lorde

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Uniting the many challenges to the commercial meritocratic ideal is a threefold plea, that we cease investing with moral connotations something as apparently haphazardly distributed as money; that we sever the doctrinaire connections routinely made between wealth and virtue; and that before we begin measuring our peers, we at least attempt to ensure that the taller ones have taken off their stilts, and that the shorter ones are not standing in a ditch.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

“The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Real love feels less like a throbbing, pulsing animal begging for its freedom and beating against the inside of my chest and more like, 'Hey, that place you like had fish tacos today and i got you some while i was out', as it sets a bag spotted with grease on the dining room table. It's not a game you don't understand the rules of, or a test you never got the materials to study for. It never leaves you wondering who could possibly be texting at 3 am. Or what you could possibly do to make it come home and stay there. It's fucking boring, dude. I don't walk around mired in uneasiness, waiting for the other shoe to drop. No parsing through spun tales about why it took her so long to come back from the store. No checking her emails or calling her job to make sure she's actually there. No sitting in my car outside her house at dawn, to make sure she's alone when she leaves. This feels safe, and steadfast, and predictable. And secure. It's boring as shit. And it's easily the best thing I've ever felt.”
― Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

“Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.”
― Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

“I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“... humility is just a humiliation you loved so much it transformed.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
― Howard Zinn