lu > lu's Quotes

“If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper
might have used the word massive,
as if a mountain range had opened
inside her, but instead

it used the word suddenly, a light coming on

in an empty room. The telephone

fell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeating
something happened, something awful

a sunday, dusky. If it had been

terminal, we could have cradled her
as she grew smaller, wiped her mouth,

said good-bye. But it was sudden,

how overnight we could be orphaned
& the world became a bell we'd crawl inside
& the ringing all we'd eat.”
― Nick Flynn

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

“Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.”
― Karl Marx

“[Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

“We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.”
― Angela Davis

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”
― Angela Davis

“Everyone is familiar with the slogan "The personal is political" -- not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of racism and repression.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“People who think they're free in this world just haven't come to the end of their leash yet.”
― Michael Parenti

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“Our resistance gave us an identity. Our identity gave us strength. Our strength gave us an unbreakable will.”
― Albert Woodfox, Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement

“I used to tell myself, “If you can breathe you can get through anything.”
― Albert Woodfox, Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.”
― Richard Wright, Native Son

“Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.”
― Richard Wright, Native Son

“Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?”
― Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

“I think the notion of dreaming in a time where we are told that it is foolish, futile or not useful is one of the most revolutionary things we can do. To have our lives determined by our dreams of a free world--instead of reactions to a state-imposed reality--is one of the most powerful tools of decolonization.”
― Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism

“We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong”
― Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“To love a person is to learn the song that is in their heart and to sing it to them when they have forgotten.”
― Arne Garborg

“Within the mystery of life there is the infinite darkness of the night sky lit by distant orbs of fire, the cobbled skin of an orange that releases its fragrance to our touch, the unfathomable depths of the eyes of our lover. No creation story, no religious system can fully describe or explain this richness and depth. Mystery is so every-present that no one can know for certain what will happen one hour from now. “

It does not matter whether you have religion or are an agnostic believe in nothing, You can only appreciate (without knowing or understanding) the mysteries of life.”
― Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path

“The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Our runaways may well be the backbone courageous among our kids: the ones who will risk hunger and forced prostitution and jail and death, in order to say NO to this overwhelming suffocation and victimizing, adult defeat into which they have been trapped, by dint of being born.”
― June Jordan

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“To deny the life of our emotions and the process of feeling is to deny how alive we are and how inseparably bound up we are with one another.”
― Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World

“Freedom is not a thing that you get or you gain or you accomplish or you buy. Freedom is essentially a relationship.”
― James and Grace Lee Boggs

“Arguments for bringing back asylums based on the large number of imprisoned people who are diagnosed with mental illness fail to account for the fact that prison is a traumatizing and sometimes torturous space that causes most people significant psychological anguish. Prison produces mental health problems.”
― Victoria Law and Maya Schenwar

“Arrogance was one of the key factors that kept the white left so factionalized.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“[C]olonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.”
― Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

“[C]apitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics.”
― Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism