Patrick > Patrick's Quotes

“And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“Remember how long you’ve been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them. At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned to you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“It is true that freedom, when it is made up principally of privileges, insults labor and separates it from culture. But freedom is not made up principally of privileges; it is made up especially of duties. And the moment each of us tries to give freedom's duties precedence over its privileges, freedom joins together labor and culture and sets in motion the only force that can effectively serve justice. The rule of our action, the secret of our resistance can be easily stated: everything that humiliates labor also humiliates the intelligence, and vice versa. And the revolutionary struggle, the centuries-old straining toward liberation can be defined first of all as a double and constant rejection of humiliation. ”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“In short, whoever does violence to truth or its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though he thinks he is serving it. From this point of view, we shall deny to the very end that a press is true because it is revolutionary; it will be revolutionary only if it is true, and never otherwise.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“A man is known by the company he keeps”
― Aesop

“Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”
― Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall

“This is awful. I don't know what's going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

“I'm not a frivolous man, nor am I, in my opinion, a serious man. It's my belief a man has to be a little of both these days. I believe, too, in the value of ahrd work-the harder the better. A man who isn't working has got too much time on his hands, too much time to dwell on himself and his problems.”
― Raymond Carver, Collected Stories

“I am a student of migration stories. I am pulled toward accounts of lives rearranged by the journey from one place to another.”
― Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces

“It is a profound, transformative gift to have someone see you as you’d like to be seen, even if you don’t see yourself that way.”
― Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces

“Love is a practice, a trail you carve out by traveling the same path over and over and over until it becomes familiar, until it lights the way home.”
― Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces

“That, ultimately, is the whole point of language, isn’t it? To lessen the crushing burden of existence by creating a tiny bridge between us. I make some sounds, and you feel seen and understood and less lonely.”
― Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces

“We do things out of fear and we do things out of love and no one tells you what happens when you act from both places at once.”
― Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces

“I didn’t understand then what a profound act of generosity this was; to see another person as a part of your tribe when they don’t see themselves that way is an act of kindness. It requires that you extend yourself to another.”
― Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces

“Elsewhere is an orientation, an emotional frequency, a chaotic compass that waits until you take a step in one direction, then immediately points in the direction behind you.”
― Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces

“What I am trying to say is: it is possible to reform your idea of yourself. It's the only real inner work there is–going back and revisiting your horrors, and holding yourself accountable and moving forward.”
― Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces

“The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live, and so far as he is concerned, a living deformed character is acceptable and a dead whole one is not.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Common Law

“He who seeks to regulate everything by law is more likely to arouse vices than to reform them. It is best to grant what cannot be abolished, even though it be in itself harmful. How many evils spring from luxury, envy, avarice, drunkenness and the like, yet these are tolerated because they cannot be prevented by legal enactments.”
― Baruch Spinoza