Tina Beattie > Tina's Quotes

“In a way, people like her, those who wield a pen, can be dangerous. At once a suspicion of fakery springs to mind – that such a Person is not him or herself, but an eye that’s constantly watching, and whatever it sees it changes into sentences; in the process it strips reality of its most essential quality – its inexpressibility.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“And that the world is a great big net, it is a whole, where no single thing exists separately; every scrap of the world, every last tiny piece, is bound up with the rest by a complex Cosmos of correspondences, hard for the ordinary mind to penetrate. That is how it works. Like a Japanese car.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“This new powerful form of hidden persuasion involved ‘setting free’ the uncaring wishful part of the self while subtly drawing the caring reality-based part into a collusion, thus weakening it through corrupting it. I suggest the most dangerous form of disavowal is the kind that says this kind of persuasion and corruption will not affect me. When an entire culture swings to consumerism, it takes a certain arrogance to suppose one will not be drawn into the culture. It takes constant struggle not to be pulled into the culture’s perverse framing. Consumerism essentially involves encouraging people to consume, devour, take over, over-run, the caring reality-based self through a gradual process of corrupting what things truly mean.”
― Sally Weintrobe, Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare

“When you tell a story, the first person you must convince is yourself; if you can make yourself believe it’s true, then everyone else will follow.”
― Raynor Winn, The Salt Path

“An old man carefully laid out a towel close by, then methodically took off every stitch of clothing and lay very precisely on the towel. There was something close to tortoise-like about the naked old man, wrinkling, drooping as if his old skin was sliding away, soon to reveal a pink, exposed, smooth new body. I had to stare. We hide ourselves so well, exposing our skin in youth when it has nothing to say, but the other skin, with the record of time and event, the truth of life, we rarely show.”
― Raynor Winn, The Salt Path

“I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know better. That’s how Capaldi sees it, and there’s a part of me that fears he’s right.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

“It’s not faith you need. Only rationality”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

“There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

“each of us special and individual? And if we just suppose that there is. Then don’t you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you’d have to learn not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her? Wouldn’t you have to learn her heart?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

“Then let me ask you something else. Let me ask you this. Do you believe in the human heart? I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual? And if we just suppose that there is. Then don’t you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you’d have to learn not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her? Wouldn’t you have to learn her heart?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun