Connor > Connor's Quotes

“She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.”
― Karl Marx

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
― Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

“This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from "I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we". ”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“It might destroy everything, even the solidity of Carol's body beside her, and the bend of Carol's body in the black sweater seemed the only solid thing in the world.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Carol

“Historia abscondita. — Every great human being exerts a retroactive force: for his sake all of history is placed in the balance again, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hiding places — into his sunshine. There is no way of telling what may yet become part of history. Perhaps the past remains essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still needed!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren't we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence.

In the world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate my cycle of freedom.”
― Frantz Fanon

“To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier
is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it
his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the
knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in
prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and
soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain
duty to escape, and to take as many people with us
as we can.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction