Quinn > Recent Status Updates

‘The world is full of people who left the place where they were born just to stay alive, and then to die in a place where they never expected to live. The world is sown with human beings who did not make it here, wherever that may be, though they might be in their way.’

‘It happens when your identify gases, names and titles giving way to numbers and papers. You become a visa to stamp, a pair of pupils for the quarantine doctor to check, fifty five kilos to add to the maximum capacity of a train; at worse an infestation, at best, a particle in transit.’

‘It doesn’t matter whether you were. Physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo: what matters is that a thousand little anchors once moored you to the world. Becoming a refugee means watching as those anchors are severed one by one until at last you’re floating outside of society, an untethered phantom in need of a new life. Some strands are cut right away… others erode more slowly.’

There are things that can only be understood retrospectively when many years have passed and the story has ended. In the meantime while the story continues the only thing to do is tell it over & over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. & it must be told, bc be4 anything can be understood it has to be narrated many times in many different words & from many different angles by many different minds.

In the media and much of the official political discourse, the word “illegal” prevails over “undocumented” and the term “immigrant” over “refugee.”

‘I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.’

‘There are as many good things about civilization as bad. Perhaps more. And we would miss them. From toothbrushes to electrics lights. From clean water to democracy. From bookstores to the kid of gentle, tolerant argumentation that never resorts to violence and allows for the slow changing of opinions and the gradual and diverse evolving of everybody’s minds.’

‘We don’t like to admit it but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people - the ancients no less than us - have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self.’

‘I believe that having a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind, in the same way I believe that it is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.’

‘It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.’

‘We just gave to close our eyes and savor the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life. We only need to be one person, to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite.’

“Most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.’

‘She realized that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, ‘it’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’’

“I did visuals who live in such impoverishment know nothing of the fine distinctions that make the world so vivid and diverse. Black is black and white is white. Bad is bad, good is good. Everything is reduced to simple categories, and this lack of nuance leads to a seductively simple view of the world.”

"News is only what is different from the everyday - the exception to the rule. ..If you are only told the exceptions, you'll think they are the rule."