Nora Murphy > Nora's Quotes

“The second reason creativity is so fascinating is that when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

“While we cannot foresee the eventual results of creativity—of the attempt to impose our desires on reality, to become the main power that decides the destiny of every form of life on the planet—at least we can try to understand better what this force is and how it works. Because for better or for worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity. The result will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

“It has been said that all the stories have already been told, that there is nothing left to say. At best, a writer’s job is to pour new wine in old bottles, to retell in a new way the same emotional predicaments that humans have felt since the beginnings of time. Yet many authors find this a worthwhile challenge; they think of themselves as gardeners whose task is to cultivate perennial ideas generation after generation. The same flowers will bloom each spring, but if the gardener slacks off, weeds will take over.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

“We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.”
― Audre Lorde

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”
― James Baldwin

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“Poverty is not only a lack of money, it's a lack of sense of meaning.”
― David Bornstein, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas

“If you're afraid to defend your convictions because you might get your ass kicked for it, you're not really fit to advocate for them.”
― James Carlos Blake

“Don’t bother trying to explain your emotions. Live everything as intensely as you can and keep whatever you felt as a gift from God. The best way to destroy the bridge between the visible and invisible is by trying to explain your emotions.”
― Paulo Coelho, Brida

“Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.”
― Sun Tzu

“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.”
― Methodist Pastor David Barnhart

“I'm concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice; I'm concerned about brotherhood; I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

“Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

“History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.”
― Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century

“Movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.”
― Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century

“One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“Systems do not maintain themselves; even our lack of intervention is an act of maintenance. Every structure in every society is upheld by the active and passive assistance of other human beings.”
― Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

“Living in a society structured to profit from our self-hate creates a dynamic in which we are so terrified of being ourselves that we adopt terror-based ways of being in our bodies. All this is fueled by a system that makes large quantities of money off our shame and bias. These experiences are not divergent but complementary.”
― Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

“We’ve been complicit—not out of malice but because we have been groomed and raised in a system of racial injustice that has relied on our obliviousness and/or apathy to maintain its uninterrupted operation”
― Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

“Making peace with your body is your mighty act of revolution. It is your contribution to a changed planet where we might all live unapologetically in the bodies we have.”
― Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

“Plain and simple, passion is a commitment without condition. It requires intensity for caring about something without regard to difficulty.”
― Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky, Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others

“Trauma stewardship is not simply an idea. It can be defined as a daily practice through which individuals, organizations, and societies tend to the hardship, pain, or trauma experienced by humans, other living beings, or our planet itself.”
― Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky, Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others

“When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

“As the poets and painters of centuries have tried to tell us, art is not about the expression of talent or the making of pretty things. It is about the preservation and containment of soul. It is about arresting life and making it available for contemplation. Art captures the eternal in the everyday, and it is the eternal that feeds soul—the whole world in a grain of sand. Leonardo”
― Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life

“Empathy underlies virtually everything that makes society work—like trust, altruism, collaboration, love, charity. Failure to empathize is a key part of most social problems—crime, violence, war, racism, child abuse, and inequity, to name just a few.”
― Bruce D. Perry, Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential--and Endangered

“Recently, Stacey Milbern brought up the concept of “crip doulas”—other disabled people who help bring you into disability community or into a different kind of disability than you may have experienced before. The more seasoned disabled person who comes and sits with your new crip self and lets you know the hacks you might need, holds space for your feelings, and shares the community’s stories. She mentioned that it’s telling that there’s not even a word for this in mainstream English. We wondered together: How would it change people’s experiences of disability and their fear of becoming disabled if this were a word, and a way of being? What if this was a rite of passage, a form of emotional labor folks knew of—this space of helping people transition? I have done this with hundreds of people. What if this is something we could all do for each other? How would our movements change? Our lives? Our beliefs about what we can do?”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

“It’s not about self-care—it’s about collective care. Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home—and these aren’t things we apologize for. It is the way we do the work, which centers disabled-femme-of-color ways of being in the world, where many of us have often worked from our sickbeds, our kid beds, or our too-crazy-to-go-out-today beds. Where we actually care for each other and don’t leave each other behind. Which is what we started with, right?”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

“Too often self-care in our organizational cultures gets translated to our individual responsibility to leave work early, go home - alone - and go take a bath, go to the gym, eat some food and go to sleep. So we do all of that 'self-care' to return to organizational cultures where we reproduce the systems we are trying to break.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

“Persistent people are able to visualize the idea of light at the end of the tunnel when others can't see it”
― Seth Godin, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit