Suma Narayan > Suma's Quotes

“Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.”
― Joseph Conrad, Chance

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“I want to drag knives over my skin, just to feel something other than shame, but I'm not even brave enough for that”
― Paula Hawkins , The Girl on the Train

“If you have been brutally broken, but still have the courage to be gentle to other living beings, then you’re a badass with the heart of an angel.”
― Keanu Reeves

“Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.

On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.”

And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.”

And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.”
― Neil Gaiman

“She explained that many people, but especially women, feel fraudulent when they are praised for their accomplishments. Instead of feeling worthy of recognition, they feel undeserving and guilty, as if a mistake has been made. Despite being high achievers, even experts in their fields, women can't seem to shake the sense that it is only a matter of time until they are found out for who they really are- impostors with limited skills or abilities.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
― audre lorde

“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

“My mother always says people should be able to take care of themselves, even if they're rich and important.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“The way you think about yourself determines your reality. You are not being hurt by the way people think about you. Many of those people are a reflection of how you think about yourself.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women

“The witch-burnings did not take place during the “Dark Ages,” as we commonly suppose. They occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries– precisely during and following the Renaissance, that glorious period when, as we are taught, “men’s” minds were being freed from bleakness and superstition. While Michelangelo was sculpting and Shakespeare writing, the witches were burning. The whole secular “Enlightenment,” in fact, the male professions of doctor, lawyer, judge, artist, all rose from the ashes of the destroyed women’s culture. Renaissance men were celebrating naked female beauty in their art, while women’s bodies were being tortured and burned by the hundreds of thousands all around them.”
― Monica Sjoo Barbara Mor

“Mature development—does not come from severing the early infantile sense of unity with the Mother, but from reestablishing it. The holistic point of ancient women’s religion was that the Mother is not one’s personal maternal parent solely, but the entire community of women, the entire living earth, and beyond this the entire surrounding and ongoing cosmic process. One could not be alienated because one is always within this process, as it is always within the self. Unless, of course, such knowledge is suppressed from the outside, by patriarchal conditioning.
Truly, our very sanity is at stake with continuing patriarchy and the denial of the cosmic self—the Goddess—within us all, and within her.
The Great Mother was the projection of the self-experience of groups of highly aware and productive women who were the founders of much of human culture. In this sense the Great Mother is not simply a mental archetype, but a historical fact.”
― Monica Sjoo Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“Colonialism is a form of vampirism that empowers and bloats the self image of the colonizing empire by draining the life energies of the colonized people; just enough blood is left to allow the colonial subject to perform a day’s work for the objective empire. And these drained energies are not only of the present and future, but of the past, of memory itself: the continuity of identity of a people, and of each individual who is colonized.
No one should recognize this process better than women; for the female sex has functioned as a colony of organized patriarchal power for several thousand years now. Our brains have been emptied out of all memory of our own cultural history, and the colonizing power systematically denies such a history ever existed. The colonizing power mocks our attempts to rediscover and celebrate our ancient matriarchies as realities. In the past women have had to accept this enforced female amnesia as “normal”; and many contemporary women continue to believe the female sex has existed always and ab aeterno as an auxiliary to the male-dominated world order. But we continue to dig in the ruins, seeking the energy of memory; believing that the reconstruction of women’s ancient history has a revolutionary potential equal to that of any political movement today.”
― Monica Sjoo Barbara Mor

“Ancient moon priestesses were called virgins. ‘Virgin’ meant not married, not belong to a man - a woman who was ‘one-in-herself’. The very word derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill; and was later applied to men: virle. Ishtar, Diana, Astarte, Isis were all all called virgin, which did not refer to sexual chasity, but sexual independence. And all great culture heroes of the past…, mythic or historic, were said to be born of virgin mothers: Marduk, Gilgamesh, Buddha, Osiris, Dionysus, Genghis Khan, Jesus - they were all affirmed as sons of the Great Mother, of the Original One, their worldly power deriving from her. When the Hebrews used the word, and in the original Aramaic, it meant ‘maiden’ or ‘young woman’, with no connotations to sexual chasity. But later Christian translators could not conceive of the ‘Virgin Mary’ as a woman of independent sexuality, needless to say; they distorted the meaning into sexually pure, chaste, never touched. When Joan of Arc, with her witch coven associations, was called La Pucelle - ‘the Maiden,’ ‘the Virgin’ - the word retained some of its original pagan sense of a strong and independent woman. The Moon Goddess was worshipped in orgiastic rites, being the divinity of matriarchal women free to take as many lovers as they choose. Women could ‘surrender’ themselves to the Goddess by making love to a stranger in her temple.”
― Monica Sjoo, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“The major premises of Christian religions are (1) the idea of Original Sin and (2) the belief in salvation through faith. Deists totally opposed these two basic Christian principles. Instead, they espoused the eighteenth-century philosophy that defined human beings as (1) essentially good, and (2) capable of progress through knowledge, reason, justice, and liberty. Deists denied the dogmas of the virgin birth, the divinity of Christ, the concept of heaven and hell, and all ideas of damnation and redemption. Deism was, in fact, the origin of what is now called “secular humanism,” and it was the practicing philosophy of the men who conducted and won the American Revolution, and became the “Founding Fathers” of the American government.”
― Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“In the world’s oldest creation myths, the female god creates the world out of her own body. The Great Mother everywhere was the active and autonomous creatrix of the world . . . and, unlike the aloof and self-righteous patriarchal gods who only recently usurped her mountain-throne, the ancient Goddess was always there—alive, immanent—within her creation; no ontological scapegoater, she was wholly responsible for both the pain and the good of life.”
― Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“Witches cast spells, not to do evil, but to promote changes of consciousness. Witches cast spells as acts of redefinition. To respell the world means to redefine the root of our being. It means to redefine us and therefore change us by returning us to our original consciousness of magical-evolutionary processes. This consciousness is within us, in our biology and in our dreams. It works on subliminal levels, whether or not we are aware of it, because it is the energy of life and imagination. When we are aware of it, it works for us, as the energy of destiny. And it is powerful, with the genuine power of biological life and cosmic imagination. Perhaps”
― Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“What these modern researchers are now “discovering” is something ancient women always knew. The warring dualisms of “matter vs. spirit,” the hostile antagonisms of “sexual body” versus “religious truth,” are recent patriarchal inventions, destructively forced on the world and the soul. They had no place at the beginning of things, for they are neither natural nor true.”
― Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“We are the imagining animals. We are the ones who participate in the earth’s evolutionary process of imagination. For what is every manifest life-form and activity on earth if not the product of earth’s imagination? Imagination, which is a form of memory moving both forward and backward in time; i.e., the creative process itself. Perhaps”
― Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“No human being—no preacher, no holy man, no church—can “put God at the center” of life. God is already there; we choose to perceive, or not to perceive, this fact. No one can “put God” anywhere; God is already there. What the fundamentalist preachers and self-appointed “holy men” mean is that they are going to put some man’s idea of God at the center—an idea that is born of the inflated egos of these preachers and holy men themselves.”
― Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“So the city emerges as man’s ultimate attempt to become manmade, born from himself rather than from Mother Nature. The feeling of self-sufficiency he achieves through the city is largely abstract and spurious: The sources of our biological lives remain the same as they always were—they come from Matter and Land. But city-man maintains contact with his natural life-sources not through immediate body experience, but through an artificial medium of exchange: money.”
― Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods: on high mountains, on hills, under a spreading tree. You must tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles [asherahs], set fire to the carved images of their gods, and wipe their name from that place. (Deuteronomy 16:20)”
― Monica Sjoo, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“Whether she is seen as the benevolent Mother of All Living, or the Goddess of bloody battle, or the Death Goddess, or the prophetic witch—the attitude toward life in matriarchal society remains the same. All life is created out of the Mother and is one with her.”
― Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“Goddess is injured wherever there is injustice, wanton cruelty, poverty, and pollution. Of course, the Goddess is not just benevolent and fertile, She is also death-dealing and the destroyer. But these are natural forces, neither good nor bad, in the impersonal universal dance.”
― Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“The biblical King David was also a sacred shepherd. His sensual and ecstatic songs of earthly love, so untypical of the Bible, derive from the ancient love rites of the shepherd king and the Goddess—her Canaanite names were Asherah, Astarte, Ashtoreth. The settled people of the Old Testament, like everyone else in the Near East, practiced Goddess worship. The Old Testament is the record of the conquest and massacre of these Neolithic people by the nomadic Hebrews, followers of a Sky God, who then set up their biblical God in the place of the ancient Goddess. The biblical Hebrews were a nomadic pastoral and patriarchal people, tribes of sheepherders and warriors who invaded land belonging to the matriarchal Canaanites. Both Hebrews and Canaanites were Semitic people. The Canaanites lived in agricultural communities and worshiped the orgiastic-ecstatic Moon Mother Astarte. As Old Testament stories relate, the Hebrews sacked, burned, and destroyed village after village belonging to the Canaanites, massacring or enslaving the people—a series of brutal invasions and slaughters described typically by theologians and preachers as “a spiritual victory.” In this way the Hebrews established themselves on the land, along with the worship of their Sky-and-Thunder God Yahweh (Jehovah), calling themselves his “chosen people.” Yahweh’s male prophets and priests, however, despite their political victory over the Canaanites, had to carry on a continuous struggle and fulmination against their own people, who kept “backsliding” into worship of the Great Mother, the Goddess of all their Near Eastern neighbors. For she had originally been the Goddess of the Hebrews themselves. This constant fight against matriarchal religion and custom is the primary theme of the Old Testament. It begins in Genesis, with the takeover of the Goddess’s Garden of Immortality by a male God, and the inversion of all her sacred symbols—tree, serpent, moon-fruit, woman—into icons of evil. Of the two sons of Eve and Adam, Cain was made the “evil brother” because he chose settled agriculture (matriarchal)—the “good brother” Abel was a nomadic pastoralist (patriarchal). The war against the Goddess is carried on by the prophets’ rantings against the “golden calf,” the “brazen serpents,” the “great harlot” and “Whore of Babylon” (the Babylonian Goddess Ishtar), against enchantresses, pythonic diviners, and those who practice witchcraft. It is in the prophets’ war against the Canaanite worship of “stone idols”—the Triple Moon Goddess worshiped as three horned pillars, or menhirs. One of her shrines was on Mount Sinai, which means “Mountain of the Moon.” Moses was commanded by “the Lord” to go forth and destroy these “idols”—who all had breasts. We are told monotheism began with the Jews, that it was the great “spiritual invention” of the religious leader Moses. This is not so. The worship of one God, like everything else in religion, began with the worship of the Goddess. Her universality has been duly noted by everyone who has ever studied the matter. “Monotheism, once thought to have been the invention of Moses or Akhnaton, was worldwide in the prehistoric and early historic world,” i.e., throughout the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages. As E. O. James wrote in The Cult of the Mother Goddess, “It seems that Evans was correct when he affirmed that it was a ‘monotheism in which the female form of divinity was supreme.” The original monotheism of the Goddess is perhaps most clearly shown by the fact that, in Elizabeth Gould Davis’s words, “Almighty Yahweh, the god of Moses and the later Hebrews, was originally a goddess.” His name, Iahu ’anat, derives from that of the Sumerian Goddess Inanna.”
― Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“Lilith, in Hebrew legend, was the rebellious woman created before Eve. She was portrayed as part snake and wearing wings—“the winding serpent who is Lilith”—and was blamed by Yahweh for having tempted Eve to reveal and initiate Adam into the mysteries of the garden. Lilith represented the ancient Canaanite worship of Astarte-Asherah, and also Ishtar of Babylon. Her relation to the very old Snake-and-Bird Goddess is obvious, and her rebellious naughty mysteries were those of yoga, of kundalini and spinal illumination. Far into medieval European Christian imagery, the serpent in paradise is pictured with a woman’s head and breasts.”
― Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

“You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it. ”
― Mary Oliver

“Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.”
― Mary Oliver

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marcel Proust