Emanuelle > Emanuelle's Quotes

“I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

“You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said.
The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

“He did not know how hawks mated but he knew that all things fought.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

“Whatever voice spoke him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity. a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

“Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

“No, those were sorry people all the way around, ever man jack a three hundred and sixty degree son of a bitch, which my daddy said meant they was a son of a bitch any way you looked at em.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

“​His other few possessions lay about in the grotto where chance had arranged them.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Child of God

“He stood for a moment, taking it all in, marveling that people thought hillbillies like him were the ones with the bad taste.”
― Barry Eisler, The Night Trade

“If there was one thing Snake knew about people, it was that once they got attached to a theory, it was hard to get them detached. They’d screen out unhelpful facts, invent favorable ones, and ignore contradictions in their own claims. Look at those Sandy Hook truthers, babbling about false flags and crisis actors and all the rest. When people were motivated enough to believe something, they were going to believe it no matter what.”
― Barry Eisler, All the Devils

“There were a lot of variations, but social engineering always came down to giving the person something to hope for, something to believe in. The impression that what was happening was just a transaction, a kind of contract with an acceptable price and a reasonable expectation of performance by the other party. Sure, the other party was offering terms at gunpoint, but under stress most people clung to their everyday beliefs, including the belief that their fellow humans could generally be counted on to carry out promises.”
― Barry Eisler, All the Devils

“Here is the thing about men lying to women while telling them they are crazy or overreacting. The lying, the underplaying on their side, makes us doubt our intuition and intelligence, so eventually when suspicions are confirmed, when we find out we have been correct all along, we do go batshit fucking crazy. And it is warranted.”
― Anna Marie Tendler, Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

“These men may have done nothing to me personally, but I hate them and I hope the force with which I’m packing my lunch conveys this to everyone.”
― Anna Marie Tendler, Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

“Women with consumption during the nineteenth century were thought to be the epitome of beauty. They are described in books and depicted in paintings as being luminescent with their milk-white skin and red lips. This is how men saw them, anyway. The perfect woman—impossibly pale, impossibly thin, lips tinted red (from coughing up blood), too tired to speak, too weak to move. All she can do is sit and stare out the window, incandescent as life leaves her body. A woman was thought by many to have contracted consumption due to some moral failing, so while her beauty was fetishized, her character was denigrated. Fucking men.”
― Anna Marie Tendler, Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

“Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie; it’s to make people fear the liar.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“But no one who studies autocratic propaganda believes that fact-checking or even swift reactions are sufficient. By the time the correction is made, the falsehood has already traveled around the world. Our old models never acknowledged the truth that many people desire disinformation. They are attracted by conspiracy theories and will not necessarily seek out reliable news at all.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“Like Maduro, Presidents Bashir al-Assad in Syria and Lukashenko in Belarus seem entirely comfortable ruling over collapsed economies and societies.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“The truth about resilience is that it's a learned behavior. If you gravitate toward hopelessness, it's not because you're hopeless, but because your brain has done it so many times before. If your mind naturally goes to despair, it's not because your situation is dire, but because you have developed strong neural pathways for despair.”
― Alan Gordon, The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain

“In Marx’s view, the core of our existence, our encounter with ourselves and with the world through labor, has become merely an external means of existence, a way of making money. Even more, we are alienated in our relation to the social world as well. Because we, as human beings, find ourselves in constant existential competition with one another, we encounter one another primarily as competitors, and thus with latent hostility; and, over time, this leads to irresolvable self-alienation.”
― Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World

“But early in the twenty-first century it became clear that the planet was incapable of sustaining everyone alive at Western levels, and at that point the richest pulled away into their fortress mansions, bought the governments or disabled them from action against them, and bolted their doors to wait it out until some poorly theorized better time, which really came down to just the remainder of their lives, and perhaps the lives of their children if they were feeling optimistic— beyond that, après moi le déluge.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“it looked like the great heat wave would be like mass shootings in the United States— mourned by all, deplored by all, and then immediately forgotten or superseded by the next one, until they came in a daily drumbeat and became the new normal.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“it’s called socialism. Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts. They are almost the same thing. Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It’s as simple as that.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“The Götterdämmerung Syndrome, as with most violent pathologies, is more often seen in men than women. It is often interpreted as an example of narcissistic rage. Those who feel it are usually privileged and entitled, and they become extremely angry when their privileges and sense of entitlement are being taken away. If then their choice gets reduced to admitting they are in error or destroying the world, a reduction they often feel to be the case, the obvious choice for them is to destroy the world; for they cannot admit they have ever erred.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“A mammal never forgets a bad scare; and they were mammals.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future