muqi > muqi's Quotes

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Tea would arrive, the cakes squatting on cushions of cream, toast in a melting shawl of butter, cups agleam and a faint wisp of steam rising from the teapot shawl.”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

“The sea was smooth, warm and as dark as black velvet, not a ripple disturbing the surface. The distant coastline of Albania was dimly outlined by a faint reddish glow in the sky. Gradually, minute by minute, this faint glow deepened and grew brighter, spreading across the sky. Then suddenly the moon, enormous, wine-red, edged herself over the fretted battlement of mountains, and threw a straight blood-red path across the dark sea. The owls appeared now, drifting from tree to tree as silently as flakes of soot, hooting in astonishment as the moon rose higher and higher, turning to pink, then gold, and finally riding in a nest of stars, like a silver bubble.”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

“Lying spread-eagled in the silky water, gazing into the sky, only moving
my hands and feet slightly to keep afloat, I was looking at the Milky Way
stretched like a chiffon scarf across the sky and wondering how many stars it
contained. I could hear the voices of the others, laughing and talking on the
beach, echoing over the water”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

“The Daffodil-Yellow Villa

The new villa was enormous, a tall, square Venetian mansion, with faded daffodil-yellow walls, green shutters, and a fox-red roof. It stood on a hill overlooking the sea, surrounded by unkempt olive groves and silent orchards of lemon and orange trees.

... the little walled and sunken garden that ran along one side of the house, its wrought-iron gates scabby with rust, had roses, anemones and geraniums sprawling across the weed-grown paths ...

... there were fifteen acres of garden to explore, a vast new paradise sloping down to the shallow, tepid sea.”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

“The sea lifted smooth blue muscles of wave as it stirred in the dawn-light, and the foam of our wake spread gently behind us like a white peacock’s tail, glinting with bubbles.”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

“If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.”
― Emma Goldman

“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”
― Emma Goldman

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
― Roald Dahl, The Twits

“There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“Since we live in a society that promotes faddism and temporary superficial adaptation of different values, we are easily convinced that changes have occurred in arenas where there has been little or no change.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“Feminist consciousness-raising has not significantly pushed women in the direction of revolutionary politics. For the most part, it has not helped women understand capitalism–how it works as a system that exploits female labor and its interconnections with sexist oppression. It has not urged women to learn about different political systems like socialism or encouraged women to invent and envision new political systems. It has not attacked materialism and our society’s addiction to overconsumption. It has not shown women how we benefit from the exploitation and oppression of women and men globally or shown us ways to oppose imperialism. Most importantly, it has not continually confronted women with the understanding that feminist movement to end sexist oppression can be successful only if we are committed to revolution, to the establishment of a new social order.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“Another response to racism has been the establishment of unlearning racism workshops, which are often led by white women. These workshops are important, yet they tend to focus primarily on cathartic individual psychological personal prejudice without stressing the need for corresponding change in political commitment and action. A woman who attends an unlearning racism workshop and learns to acknowledge that she is racist is no less a threat than one who does not. Acknowledgment of racism is significant when it leads to transformation.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“To be oppressed means to be deprived of your ability to choose.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“Often emphasis on identity and lifestyle is appealing because it creates a false sense that one is engaged in praxis. However, praxis within any political movement that aims to have a radical transformative impact on society cannot be solely focused on creating spaces wherein would-be radicals experience safety and support. Feminist movement to end sexist oppression actively engages participants in revolutionary struggle. Struggle is rarely safe or pleasurable.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“it is equally essential that we address without fear those who exploit, oppress, and dominate us. If women remain unable to speak to and about men in a feminist voice then our challenge to male domination on other fronts is seriously undermined.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society formed upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of its existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering - unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes – the walls, the walls!”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia