Jess > Jess's Quotes

“Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”
― Josephine Hart, Damage

“I don't want to die without any scars.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Damned

“Nevertheless, if you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane. A child allows us to revisit the excitement we once felt about, well... everything. A generation later, our grandkids bump up our enthusiasm yet again. Reproducing is a kind of booster shot to keep us loving life.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Damned

“Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks"

All those men were there inside,
when she came in totally naked.
They had been drinking: they began to spit.
Newly come from the river, she knew nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh.
Obscenities drowned her golden breasts.
Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears.
Not knowing clothes, she did not have clothes.
They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs,
and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor.
She did not speak because she had no speech.
Her eyes were the colour of distant love,
her twin arms were made of white topaz.
Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light,
and suddenly she went out by that door.
Entering the river she was cleaned,
shining like a white stone in the rain,
and without looking back she swam again
swam towards emptiness, swam towards death.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“You don't feel like you're hurting yourself when you're cutting. You feel like this is the only way to take care of yourself.”
― Marilee Strong, A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain

“I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention. For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks-accidentally-and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you’re alive.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“Why shouldn’t people be spurred to action as much by the existing shame of their country’s injustices as they are by the threatened shame of conquest? he wondered. Why shouldn’t the commitment and fellowship and urgency of war be grafted onto the morality of ordinary times?”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help

“Journalism was vigilant about separating the church of editorial from the secular concerns of business. We can now see the justification for such fanaticism about building a thick, tall wall between the two. The fear was that we’d enter a world where readers couldn’t tell the difference between editorial and advertising—where the corrupt hand of advertisers would interfere with the journalistic search for truth. Those fears are in the process of being realized.”
― Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

“Here’s the bad news. You and everyone else around you have been trained not to just settle for mediocrity, but to actually strive for it. You’ve been force-fed the concept that simple is better, that average is supreme, that losing is winning. You’ve been running towards the wrong goal and you’ve wasted a tremendous amount of your precious life trying to go after something that you’ve incorrectly convinced yourself you want. Honestly, you’re a fucking idiot.”
― Elan Gale, You're Not That Great:

“After a while most people with PTSD don’t spend a great deal of time or effort on dealing with the past—their problem is simply making it through the day. Even traumatized patients who are making real contributions in teaching, business, medicine, or the arts and who are successfully raising their children expend a lot more energy on the everyday tasks of living than do ordinary mortals.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Like everyone else in Nagasaki that day, Yoshida’s immediate survival and degree of injury from burns and radiation depended entirely on his exact location, the direction he was facing in relation to the bomb, what he was wearing, and what buildings, walls, trees, or even rocks stood between him and the speeding force of the bomb’s titanic power.”
― Susan Southard, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War

“Why is love beyond all measure of other human possibilities so rich and such a sweet burden for the one who has been struck by it? Because we change ourselves into that which we love, and yet remain ourselves. Then we would like to thank the beloved, but find nothing that would do it adequately. We can only be thankful to ourselves. Love transforms gratitude into faithfulness to ourselves and into an unconditional faith in the Other. Thus love steadily expands its most intimate secret. Closeness here is existence in the greatest distance from the other- the distance that allows nothing to dissolve - but rather presents the “thou” in the transparent, but “incomprehensible” revelation of the “just there”. That the presence of the other breaks into our own life - this is what no feeling can fully encompass. Human fate gives itself to human fate, and it is the task of pure love to keep this self-surrender as vital as on the first day.”
― Martin Heidegger

“Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative.”
― Martin Heidegger

“Philosophy, then, is not a doctrine, not some simplistic scheme for orienting oneself in the world, certainly not an instrument or achievement of human Dasein. Rather, it is this Dasein itself insofar as it comes to be, in freedom, from out of its own ground. Whoever, by stint of research, arrives at this self-understanding of philosophy is granted the basic experience of all philosophizing, namely that the more fully and originally research comes into its own, the more surely is it "nothing but" the transformation of the same few simple questions. But those who wish to transform must bear within themselves the power of a fidelity that knows how to preserve. And one cannot feel this power growing within unless one is up in wonder. And no one can be caught up in wonder without travelling to the outermost limits of the possible. But no one will ever become the friend of the possible without remaining open to dialogue with the powers that operate in the whole of human existence. But that is the comportment of the philosopher: to listen attentively to what is already sung forth, which can still be perceived in each essential happening of world. And in such comportment the philosopher enters the core of what is truly at stake in the task he has been given to do. Plato knew of that and spoke of it in his Seventh Letter:

'In no way can it be uttered, as can other things, which one can learn. Rather, from out of a full, co-existential dwelling with the thing itself - as when a spark, leaping from the fire, flares into light - so it happens, suddenly, in the soul, there to grow, alone with itself.”
― Martin Heidegger

“The degree to which I can create relationships, which facilitate the growth of others as separate persons, is a measure of the growth I have achieved in myself.”
― Carl R Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.”
― Gustavo Gutiérrez

“The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?

No, thank you,' he will think. 'Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Peace is something you make with your adversaries, not with your friends.”
― Johan Galtung, Johan Galtung: Pioneer of Peace Research

“None of us actually lives as though there were no truth. Our problem is more with the notion of a single, unchanging truth.
The word 'true' suggest a relationship between things: being true to someone or something, truth as loyalty, or something that fits, as two surfaces may be said to be 'true.' It is related to 'trust,' and is fundamentally a matter of what one believes to be the case. The Latin word verum (true) is cognate with a Sanskrit word meaning to choose or believe: the option one chooses, the situation in which one places one's trust. Such a situation is not an absolute - it tells us not only about the chosen thing, but also about the chooser. It cannot be certain: it involves an act of faith and it involves being faithful to one's intentions.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance – second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole. These gifts of the left hemisphere have helped us achieve nothing less than civilisation itself, with all that that means. Even if we could abandon them, which of course we can't, we would be fools to do so, and would come off infinitely the poorer. There are siren voices that call us to do exactly that, certainly to abandon clarity and precision (which, in any case, importantly depend on both hemispheres), and I want to emphasise that I am passionately opposed to them. We need the ability to make fine discriminations, and to use reason appropriately. But these contributions need to be made in the service of something else, that only the right hemisphere can bring. Alone they are destructive. And right now they may be bringing us close to forfeiting the civilisation they helped to create.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“Through the experience of time, Dasein becomes a ‘being towards death’: without death existence would be care-less, would lack the power that draws us to one another and to the world.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

“how we try to make sense of the world and of our place in it—it should be obvious that our approach is fundamentally limited in scope. This realization should open doors, not close them, since it makes the search for knowledge an open-ended pursuit, an endless romance with the unknown.”
― Marcelo Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning

“It’s what we don’t know that matters.”
― Marcelo Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning

“What is the stuff that makes everything that is?” they asked. That this remains the defining question of modern particle physics serves to show that the value of a great question is that it keeps generating answers that, in turn, keep changing as our methods of inquiry change.”
― Marcelo Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning

“If there is any enlightenment that I have been awakened to, it is that men’s minds are dominated by their little aches and pains. We want to think that we are more than that, that we control our lives with our intellect. But now, without civilization clouding the issue, I wonder to what extent intellect is controlled by instinct and culture is the result of raw gut reactions to life.”
― Steven Callahan, Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea