Christie Koehler > Christie's Quotes

“We all know that change is hard, but we don’t know enough about why it is so hard and what we can do about it.”
― Robert Kegan, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
― Alice Walker

“When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“No Utopia is Utopia for everyone”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“No daylight to separate us.

Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“Sometimes resilience arrives in the moment you discover your own unshakeable goodness.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“Every crisis, actual or impending, needs to be viewed as an opportunity to bring about profound changes in our society. Going beyond protest organizing, visionary organizing begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.”
― Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century

“The physical threat posed by climate change represents a crisis that is not only material but also profoundly spiritual at its core because it challenges us to think seriously about the future of the human race and what it means to be a human being.”
― Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century

“Still, it becomes clearer every day that organizing or joining massive protests and demanding new policies fail to sufficiently address the crisis we face. They may demonstrate that we are on the right side politically, but they are not transformative enough. They do not change the cultural images or the symbols that play such a pivotal role in molding us into who we are.”
― Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century

“We are beginning to understand that the world is always being made fresh and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival; that's struggle doesn't always have to be confrontational but can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many others in our society who are also seeking ways out from alienation, isolation, privatization, and dehumanization by corporate globalization.”
― Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century

“Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after”
― Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century