Yas > Yas's Quotes

“The rebirth of the soul is perpetual; only rebirth every hour could stay the hand of Satan.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“Sometimes an understanding silence was better than a bunch of meaningless words.”
― Mia Sheridan, Archer's Voice

“Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Love is an action, a participatory emotion. Whether we are engaged in a process of self-love or of loving others we must move beyond the realm of feeling to actualize love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Healthy families resolve conflict without coercion, shaming, or violence.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“When an individual trusts another sufficiently to expose the true self--the deepest fears, the hidden desires--a powerful intimacy is born.”
― Sarah Pekkanen, An Anonymous Girl

“This moment is now a bookmark in my life. There is a before and an after. I’ll never get to go back to the before. But I don’t want to live in the after. Not without Jules.”
― Lizzy Mason, Remind Me to Hate You Later

“I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create - this is man.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“You are yourself, and so remain, as I remain.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“She cannot stop herself from reaching out, from trying with a touch to say, I'm here. Sometimes you have to hold a person, though they'll mistake embrace for strangulation.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I wish sometimes I could be less fierce with you. No- I feel sometimes like I ought to want to be less fierce with you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Perhaps survival is its own form of torture.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Hope may be a dream. But she will fight to make it real.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“Love is a constant negotiation, a constant conversation; to love someone is to lay yourself open to rejection and abandonment; love is something you can earn but not extort. It is an arena in which you are not in control, because someone else also has rights and decisions; it is a collaborative process; making love is at its best a process in which those negotiations become joy and play.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions

“Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions

“Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is often described as the result of having a great many ducks lined up in a row - spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences - even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions

“In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being