chenoa > chenoa's Quotes

“Destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Sylvester says they sold their lefty student principles, if they ever had them, as soon as they left university and accepted an overpaid starter-salary in a morally objectionable corporate job offering lucrative career prospects and inflated annual bonuses which soon turned them into filthy-rich Tories with a hatred of the social welfare infrastructures they’re actively not contributing to through tax avoidance and evasion while hypocritically scorning the underclasses as the scourge of society who sponge off the state when they’re the ones who are the biggest scroungers on society with no sense of community responsibility other than a very self-aggrandizing, tax-deductible form of fashionable charity they like to call philanthropism!”
― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

“When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you are drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life. Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole world revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“Or was she saying: look at these men going to the moon, be afraid my child at what humans can do, because we don't know what it all means, we know the fanfare and glory of the pioneering human spirit and we know the wonder of splitting the atom and we know what these advances can do, your grandmother knew it only too well when she stepped off the pavement to a sound she didn't recognise and a flash that seemed both distant and so close it might have happened inside her own head, and in her bewilderment came a kernel of knowledge that this might be it, a knowledge that gave rise instantly to a vision of me, her first and only child, which was the last vision she ever experienced, so I am saying to you Chie, my first and only child, that you might regard in wonder these men walking on the moon but you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn't know when to stop, it doesn't know when to call it a day, so be wary is what I mean when I say nothing, be wary.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital