Laurel > Laurel's Quotes

“We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Dragon: Fifteen Stories

“In terms of tacos, she was doing fine.”
― Joseph Fink, Welcome to Night Vale

“I think what you mostly do when you find you really are alone is to panic. You rush to the opposite extreme and pack yourself into groups - clubs, teams, societies, types. You suddenly start dressing exactly like the others. It's a way of being invisible. The way you sew the patches on the holes in your blue jeans becomes incredibly important. If you do it wrong you're not with it. That's a peculiar phrase, you know? With it. With what? With them. With the others. All together. Safety in numbers. I'm not me. I'm a basketball letter. I'm a popular kid. I'm my friend's friend. I'm a black leather growth on a Honda. I'm a member. I'm a teenager. You can't see me, all you can see is us. We're safe. And if We see You standing alone by yourself, if you're lucky we'll ignore you. If you're not lucky, we might throw rocks. Because we don't like people standing there with the wrong kind of patches on their jeans reminding us that we're each alone and none of us is safe.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

“Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew that had none touched him when he lay thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that wisdom Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it is heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore

“The revival of magical beliefs is possible today because it no longer represents a social threat. The mechanization of the body is so constitutive of the individual that, at least in industrialized countries, giving space to the belief in occult forces does not jeopardize the regularity of social behavior. Astrology too can be allowed to return, with the certainty that even the most devoted consumer of astral charts will automatically consult the watch before going to work.”
― Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

“We commit to our own healing in part because the realization of what we are dreaming of rests on it. It is our responsibility to one another to do our internal work, not so that we feel good alone but to stay an active part of the whole and to refuse to pass down to the next generation what pain we've accrued.”
― Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World

“To what and to whom are you committed? What do you long for? And what is worth traveling through the unknown to reach?”
― Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World

“Friendships are tiny interventions of love and empathy and oxytocin that calm our bodies, keep us healthy, and ready us for connection.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“If citizenship is a matter of shared beliefs, then I believe in the democracy of species. If citizenship means an oath of loyalty to a leader, then I choose the leader of the trees. If good citizens agree to uphold the laws of the nation, then I choose natural law, the law of reciprocity, of regeneration, of mutual flourishing.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“If you have yet to be called an incorrigable, defiant woman,
don't worry, there is still time”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“we all begin the process before we are ready, before we are strong enough, before we know enough; we begin a dialogue with thoughts and feelings that both tickle and thunder within us. We respond before we know how to speak the language, before we know all the answers, and before we know exactly to whom we are speaking.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“Our friends advertise the kaleidoscope of ways we can live. They expose us to new ways of being in the world, showing us another life is possible.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“When choosing friends, we are freer to prioritize the truest markers of intimacy, such as shared values, trust, admiration of each other’s character, or feelings of ease around each other.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“The theory emphasizes that our identity needs to constantly expand for us to be fulfilled, and relationships are our primary means for expansion.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“Secure friends make you feel safe. You’re scared to tell someone you experience bouts of depression, or broke ties with your great-aunt, or put ketchup on your eggs, and your secure friends make you feel loved regardless. Researchers found that secure people report being more accepting of others and better listeners. In chapter 1, we discussed how friends can make us feel human again when we experience shame. Secure friends do this better than anyone else. They provide us with friendships that heal.”
― Marisa G. Franco, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends

“In today’s America, we tend to think of healing as something binary: either we’re broken or we’re healed from that brokenness. But that’s not how healing operates, and it’s almost never how human growth works. More often, healing and growth take place on a continuum, with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health.”
― Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts

“All of this suggests that one of the best things each of us can do—not only for ourselves, but also for our children and grandchildren—is to metabolize our pain and heal our trauma. When we heal and make more room for growth in our nervous systems, we have a better chance of spreading our emotional health to our descendants, via healthy DNA expression. In contrast, when we don’t address our trauma, we may pass it on to future generations, along with some of our fear, constriction, and dirty pain.”
― Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts

“I do not need to contain my appetites.

What is a monster but a creature of agency?”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“A vampire is a creature of total want, of pure appetite, an antithesis to our self-denial, and I find myself picking through the bones of the story about the tension between these two states. Appetite is a dirty word for women, a cardinal sin. For food and sex, yes, but also for power, for ambition, for violence. What is Carmilla but a woman unleashed on any limits on her appetites? Does it make her monstrous? Is what we celebrate in men always monstrous in women? Is it also not monstrous to starve ourselves, to kill our appetite until we embody a living death?”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“I hated her because I did not understand what it was that I had lost before I saw it in her.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“I made a bargain in my youth, for safety, for survival, and it has all been for naught. I am not safe. I have never been safe.

So why have I tried so hard to create it? All I have made is a prison.

But perhaps if I have never been safe, that means fear has no purpose.

I am not safe if I obey and reduce and control, just as I am not safe if I rebel and shout and anger.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“Before, I stood on the banister of the balcony above the dining hall and thought the solution to the burden of myself was to end it all. How foolish that seems now. How futile. I could go, and no one would care.
How much better to make them all regret knowing me.”
― Kat Dunn, Hungerstone

“Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance: not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there's more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model... So I was sent alone, for your sake? Or for my own? I don't know. Yes, it has made things difficult.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Progress means nothing to presence.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness