Sam > Sam's Quotes

“Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“[...] we need to cultivate the courage to be uncomfortable and to teach the people around us how to accept discomfort as a part of growth.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“I was in close quarters with some representative specimens of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“Our gathering was not as strange a thing as it might have appeared. A xenophobe would see a company of foreigners in camouflage uniforms, carrying out military drills and calisthenics, and might imagine us to be the lead element of some nefarious Asian invasion of the American homeland, a Yellow Peril in the Golden State, a diabolical dream of Ming the Merciless sprung to life. Far from it. The General's men, by preparing themselves to invade our now communist homeland, were in fact turning themselves into new Americans. After all, nothing was more American than wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence, unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and independence.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
― Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

“Culture belongs to the imagination; to judge it rationally is to misunderstand its function.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam

“The struggle for the Islam I loved and the struggle for the West I loved were the same struggle, and it was within that struggle that the clash of civilizations was eradicated.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“To people unfamiliar with the last thirty years of post-colonial academics, this might seem a ridiculous word, without meaning or substance. They may be right. It’s a fancy word for racist, but implies much more: an Orientalist is someone who invents exotic fictions about the East to prove a point about western superiority. Orientalism is a very serious charge to lay at the doorstep of a left-leaning academic.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“I’ve learned something about westerners,” said Omar, smiling a little. “The ones who feel guilty are the ones with the least reason to be. And the ones who should feel guilty never do.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”
― Angela Davis

“there was an assumption that I was personally attacking Sarah Palin by impersonating her on TV. No one ever said it was 'mean' when Chevy Chase played Gerald Ford falling down all the time. No one ever accused Dana Carvey or Darrell Hammond or Dan Aykroyd of 'going too far' in their political impressions. You see what I'm getting at here. I am not mean and Mrs. Palin is not fragile. To imply otherwise is a disservice to us both.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent.”
― Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

“You are perfectly cast in your life. I can't imagine anyone but you in the role. Go play.”
― Lin-Manuel Miranda

“It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”
― Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

“There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”
― Michel Foucault

“The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”
― Michel Foucault

“Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.”
― Rumi

“Dance is the hidden language of the soul”
― Martha Graham

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“What do we say to the Lord of Death?'

'Not today.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Valar Morghulis.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson