Donovan > Donovan's Quotes

“Owning land is like owning the ocean, or the air. no one owns land.”
― Tamanend

“Revolution is not a one time event.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“Qui tacet consentire videtur is Latin for “Silence gives consent.” When we say nothing, when we do nothing, we are consenting to these trespasses against us.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“Being a stranger was like being dead,
and brought to mind how, in a book he had read
that most folks misunderstood one common state:
The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.”
― David Rakoff, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“I think it is time for a modern War Against Error. A deliberately heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence, and metastasizing lies. A wider war that is fought daily by human rights organizations in journals, reports, indexes, dangerous visits, and encounters with malign oppressive forces. A hugely funded and intensified battle of rescue from the violence that is swallowing the dispossessed.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book."

[Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]”
― E.B. White

“I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human. I felt very puny as a human. I thought, 'Fuck that. I want to be a superhuman.”
― David Bowie

“Even a little bit of fame can mess with your head. It’s a cognitive disease, you know? Fame. It used to only be for royalty and we know what they’re like. I’m not much of a Freudian, but something about fame makes the ID and the Superego devour the Ego like an anacondas in a cage, right before they cannibalize each other. Fame warps your identity, metastasizes your anxieties and hollows you out like a jack-o-lantern. It’s sparkly pixy dust that burns whatever it touches like acid.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“How jarring it must have been to be an adult Narraganett [Native American] and this strange white man shows up out of the blue and shatters his lifelong peace of mind with what the stranger calls the 'good news' that the native is in fact a wicked, worthless evildoer and so was his mother. So said native dies terrified by his big, naughty un-christian heart of stone instead of, say, as the Shawnee Tecumseh would later advise, 'Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.'" (The Wordy Shipmates)”
― Sarah Vowell

“racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but neither it nor its succubus twin fascism is new or can make anything new. It can only reproduce the environment that supports its own health: fear, denial, and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight. The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are not to be found in one political party or another, or in one or another wing of any single political party. Democrats have no unsullied history of egalitarianism. Nor are liberals free of domination agendas. Republicans have housed abolitionists and white supremacists. Conservative, moderate, liberal; right, left, hard left, far right; religious, secular, socialist—we must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any developed country can become a suitable home. Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“Q: Why write about slavery? Haven’t we had enough stories about slavery? Why do we need another one?

A: I could have written about upper middle class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there’s a lot of competition.”
― Colson Whitehead

“A state of shock is what happens to us- individually or as a society- when we experience a sudden and unprecedented event for which we do not yet have adequate explanation. At its essence, a shock is the gap that opens up between event and existing narratives to explain that event, Being creatures of narrative, humans tend to be very uncomfortable with meaning vacuums- which is why those opportunistic players, the people I have termed "disaster capitalists," have been able to rush into the gap with their preexisting wish lists and simplistic stories of good and evil.”
― Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”
― Wole Soyinka

“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Collected Works

“Why study authenticity if not to seek it? Try to ring some last truth from that word before it's so leeched of meaning that becomes a word casing, a shell without a bullet. A term that can be used only inside quotation marks.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know.

Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven't said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.”
― Tove Jansson

“My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, A Few Figs from Thistles

“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Not being funny doesn’t make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.”
― David Rakoff, Fraud

“Art feasts upon its maker”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

“Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“I'll string a fiddle with your guts and make you play it while I dance.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“Not to be born at all
Is best, far best that can befall,
Next best, when born, with least delay
To trace the backward way.
For when youth passes with its giddy train,
Troubles on troubles follow, toils on toils,
Pain, pain forever pain;
And none escapes life's coils.
Envy, sedition, strife,
Carnage and war, make up the tale of life.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

“Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.”
― David Bowie