Sommer-Jade > Sommer-Jade's Quotes

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”
― Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

“If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.”
― Hans-Georg Gadamer

“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you... The discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”
― Kenneth Burke

“The view, like champagne, amplified all of the emotions that were offered to it.”
― Michelle de Krester

“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast, and these two people in the water, trying to hold on to each other, holding as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how I think it is with us. It's a shame, Cath, because we've loved each other all our lives, but in the end, we can't stay together forever.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“Sure? You say you're *sure*? Sure that you're in love. How can you know it? You think love is so simple? So you are in love. Deeply in love. Is that what you're saying to me?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“Knowledge was different, unbounded, endlessly renewed. I wanted the roll and slosh of its depths beneath me, the risk of drowning. I wanted it to carry me beyond the limits of myself.”
― Michelle de Krester

“I thought, I didn't know that this could be art. It was the first time I'd seen my everyday, unglamorous world in a film. It made me tremble a little. Liz and I owned the same paperbacks, books with a Virago apple or a Women's Press iron on the spine. We had the same aluminium teapot with a turquoise lid, the same cream telephone handset, the same open pantry shelves. Liz’s bed linen and curtains were blue, so I guess that we shared a favourite colour. But these were only superficial, if spooky, correspondences. What made my heart run like a hare was hearing my mind exposed.”
― Michelle de Krester

“Dumb mixed feelings are knowledge that lives outside language and outside time.”
― Michelle de Krester

“I’m writing this book because I believe in love. Again and again I have experienced the power of love to heal, to bridge, to connect, and to awaken, as well as the trauma that ensues in its absence. In many ways my life is centred in not just believing in love, but being love. That is, emanating love as best as I can, moment by moment, interaction by interaction.”
― Jessica Fern, Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy

“It is commonly believed and culturally reinforced that your partner completes you, that your identity should be fused with your partner or the relationship, and that your partner is the main source of meaning, love, and happiness in your life. True intimacy does not come from enmeshment, but from two differentiated individuals sharing themselves with each other.”
― Jessica Fern, Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy

“Our partners can be the inspiration for meaning and purpose in life, as well as the objects or focus of our love, but they should not be the source of it. You are the source of your happiness, love, courage, emotional regulation, and purpose, and the sooner that you can release your partner from being the source of these experiences, the better for everyone involved.”
― Jessica Fern, Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy

“There is a certain exquisite pleasure in the wavering of the balance.”
― Theognis

“Eros’s ambivalence unfolds directly from this power to mix up the self.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“We read too much, write too poorly, and remember too little about the delightful discomfort of learning these skills for the first time…”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“Eros’s action is to reach, and the reach of desire involves every lover in an activity of the imagination.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“Reader and writer bring together two halves of one meaning. An intimate collusion occurs. The meaning composed is private and true and makes permanent perfect sense.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“He loved, that is, the process of coming to know… In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown… It is an erotic space. When the mind reaches out to know, the space of desire opens.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“If I have achieved independence, if I can stand and walk without needing crutches, without having to dominate and exploit anyone else. Respect exists only on the basis of freedom. L’amour est l’enfant de la liberté.”
― Erich Fromm

“To respect a person is not possible without knowing him. Care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge. Knowledge would be empty if it were not motivated by concern. The knowledge which is an aspect of love is one which does not stay at the periphery but penetrates to the core. It is possible only when I can transcend the concern for myself and see the other person in his own terms.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“The most daring and radical consequence of rationalism is based on our knowledge of the fundamental and not accidental limitations of our knowledge… we shall never grasp the secret of man and of the universe, but… we can know nevertheless in the act of love.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“Genuine love is an expression of productiveness and implies care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. It is not an affect in the sense of being affected by somebody, but an act of striving for the growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s own capacity to love.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“Thought can only lead us to the knowledge that it cannot give us the ultimate answer. The world of thought remains caught in the paradox.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“While one is consciously afraid of not being loved, the real though usually unconscious fear is that of loving. To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the next person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“I don’t think true love means your only love. I think true love means loving truly… Maybe you get lots of true loves then. Maybe that’s the gift you get for being brave.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, One True Loves

“I am who I am because I loved you once.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid