Nina > Nina's Quotes

“None of us remembers being born, but all of us were born. None of us will remember dying, but we remember others dying. Empathy is not just some vague urging to be kind. Empathy is a precondition for certain knowledge of the world. The isolated individual, trying to contemplate the world alone, has no chance at understanding it.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Freedom

“The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.”
― W. H. Auden

“If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.”
― W.H. Auden

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
― Audre Lorde

“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”
― Audre Lorde

“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.

I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood.

They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.”
― Lynda Barry, What It Is

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”
― William Carlos Williams, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower & Other Love Poems

“What is most personal is most universal.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott

“Although I am a typical loner in my daily life, my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation.”
― Albert Einstein