Jeff > Jeff's Quotes

“...dreadful birds, dressed in red with breasts of silver buttons, and cocked heads and sharp mouths, looking for guilt like berries on a bush.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“What I am is very much a function of what I am not. If the "other" is the Muslim world, then I am the Judeo-Christian world. IF the other is from thousands of light-years away, I am simply human. Redefine alterity and you can erase boundaries.”
― Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants

“It’s up to us to make the choice to be grateful even when things aren’t going well. Nouwen calls that the “discipline of gratitude.” To me, it means not just being grateful for the good things, because that’s easy, but also to be grateful for the hard things too. To be grateful even for our flaws, because in the end, they make us stronger by giving us a chance to reach beyond our grasp.”
― Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened

“I have come to believe that it is our life's work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath. That it is our life's work work to mistrust our measures. Especially those about moral and mental standing. To remember that behind every ruler there is a Ruler. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

“When I give up the fish, I get, at long last, that thing I had been searching for: a mantra, a trick, a prescription for hope. I get the promise that there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them. Not because I worked for them. But because they are as much a part of Chaos as destruction and loss. Life, the flip side of death. Growth, of rot.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

“What we forget about animals we begin to forget about ourselves.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Rather than anchoring our hope beyond the struggle, always projecting ahead, perhaps locating joy within the struggle through our full presence can be our essential gesture at this moment in time. To feel the pain of now and not look away. To act not with the hope of moving forward, always forward, but to see the wisdom of stepping sideways as we create a different space, a more conscious space in the direction of pause, where we can breathe and gather ourselves so we can gather others around us and create a community of care, even within our own families, especially within our own families.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion: Essays of Undoing

“Maintaining the social contract required trust, it required that we see ourselves as bound together if not as a family then at least as a community each member worthy of concern and able to make claims on the whole. It required us to believe that whatever actions the government might take to help those in need were available to you and people like you that nobody was gaming the system and the misfortunes or stumbles or circumstances that caused others to suffer were ones to which you at some point in your life might fall prey. Over the years that trust proved difficult to sustain.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land