Torquato > Torquato's Quotes

“When we have to think strategically, we also have to accept our complicity: we forgo any illusions of purity; we give up the safety of exteriority. If we are not exterior to the problem under investigation, we too are the problem under investigation. Diversity work is messy, even dirty, work.”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“Now I know that uncertainty is the greatest miracle of all. When we hold ourselves open to the possibility of error, a blessing can arrive that we never imagined possible. The oceans can part and offer a way forward. A question blooms season after season, yielding new flowers, new ideas. But an answer is solid. It bears only one fruit. And very often, it is the wrong fruit.”
― Sophie Strand, The Madonna Secret

“Looking back, that was one of my first adult lessons on self-trust: to not know what I was doing and try anyway.”
― Alexandra Elle, How We Heal: Uncover Your Power and Set Yourself Free

“I am love. It is never lacking or able to be stolen from me. I am good enough. I trust life. Life is kind. There is no pain too great not to be fed by my love and kindness. I am strong. My worth is not to be gained. I am already all of the worth I will ever be.”
― Sarah Blondin, Heart Minded: How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love

“I know how scary or intimidating it can be to disconnect, to walk in the opposite direction of all that bright, shiny, noisy distraction. I have faced that fear again and again as I have answered my own call to stillness. But no matter the size of aversion or fear, you must trust me when I say that all that will matter, all that will ever amount to anything, is the relationship you have with the world you carry around inside of you.”
― Sarah Blondin, Heart Minded: How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love

“Hardship is not punishment, dear one. Feelings are not punitive; they are bubbles of grace rising to the surface. Make friends with the shifting sands deep within you; you are opening, changing. Let the air that needs to be released release when and how it comes. Love these bubbles of grace. Curl the corners of your mouth into a small smile as they leave.”
― Sarah Blondin, Heart Minded: How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love

“I disapprove of matrimony as a matter of principle.... Why should any independent, intelligent female choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband? I assure you, I have yet to meet a man as sensible as myself! (Amelia Peabody)”
― Elizabeth Peters, Crocodile on the Sandbank

“The Dimwit's Guide to the Female Mind might assist your efforts in understanding human females. But it must be pointed out that this subject can be a dangerous adventure and should be undertaken with extreme caution. After all, human males have been trying to understand their females for generations, and most of the time they come away from these encounters looking like someone stuck their tails into an electric socket.”
― Anne Bishop, Marked in Flesh

“After my book Wanderlust came out in 2000, I found myself better able to resist being bullied out of my own perceptions and interpretations. On two occasions around that time, I objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest- in a nutshell, female.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“Thus the “brainy” economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse—providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect “subject” for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-with-out-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity—shock treatments—as “human interest” shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire. For this stream of stimulants is designed to produce cravings for more and more of the same, though louder and faster, and these cravings drive us to do work which is of no interest save for the money it pays—to buy more lavish radios, sleeker automobiles, glossier magazines, and better television sets, all of which will somehow conspire to persuade us that happiness lies just around the corner if we will buy one more.”
― Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“The problem is that we who are badly wounded in our relation to the feminine usually have a fairly successful persona, a good public image. We have grown up as docile, often intellectual, daughters of the patriarchy, with what I call ‘animus-egos.’ We strive to keep up the virtues and aesthetic ideals which the patriarchal superego has presented to us. But we are filled with self-loathing and a deep sense of personal ugliness and failure when we can neither meet nor mitigate the superego’s standards of perfection.

But we also feel unseen because there are no images alive to reflect our wholeness and variety. But where shall we look for symbols to suggest the full mystery and potency of the feminine and to provide images as models for personal life. The later Greek goddesses and Mary, Virgin Mother, and Mediator, have not struck me to the core as have Innana-Ereshkigal, Kali, and Isis. An image for the goddess as Self needs to have a full-bodied coherence. So I have had to see the female Greek deities as partial aspects of one wholeness pattern and to look always for the darker powers hidden i their stories—the gorgon aspect of Athena, the underworld Aphrodite-Urania, the Black Demeter, etc.
Even in the tales of Inanna and other early Sumerian, Semitic, and Egyptian writings there is evidence that the original potencies of the feminine have been ‘demoted.' As Kramer tells us, the goddesses ‘that held top rank in the Sumerian pantheon were gradually forced down the ladder by male theologians’ and ‘their powers turned over to male deities. This permitted cerebral-intellectual-Apollonian, left brain consciousness, with its ethical and conceptual discriminations, to be born and to grow.”
― Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women

“When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.”
― Anaïs Nin

“There is no greater love than the love the wolf feels for the lamb-it-doesn’t-eat.”
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts

“How absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself. Everybody should try it.”
― Barbara Pym, A Very Private Eye: The Diaries, Letters and Notebooks of Barbara Pym

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
― Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

“We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it’s very healthy, because it’s the only place where we never lie. At night we don’t lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life.”
― Helene Cixous

“Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.”
― Thomas Merton

“But isn’t being alone closer to the truest version of ourselves, when we’re not linked to another, not diluted by their presence and judgments? We form relationships with others, friends, family. That’s fine. Those relationships don’t bind the way love does. We can still have lovers, short-term. But only when alone can we focus on ourselves, know ourselves. How can we know ourselves without this solitude?”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“The trout fisher, like the landscape painter, haunts the loveliest places of the earth, and haunts them alone. Solitude and his own thoughts—he must be on the best terms with all of these; and he who can take kindly the largest allowance of these is likely to be the kindliest and truest with his fellow men.”
― Thomas Hughes

“To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The various forms of education or ‘normalization’ imposed upon an individual consist in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. Then from the subject of enunciation issues a subject of the statement, in other words, a subject bound to statements in conformity with a dominant reality”
― Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke . . . She will need her sisterhood.”
― Gloria Steinem

“We tried not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time.”
― Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.”
― Colette

“I am a woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split. I feel the necessity for dialogue. Sometimes I feel it urgently.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“The white people I met were well-meaning, well-read liberal folks who happened to know all the ins and outs of racism and colonialism, but somehow positioned these problems outside of themselves rather than taking ownership of them. They did not understand themselves to be part of the problem, and they did not see themselves as benefitting from these systems of oppression. Many saw themselves as strictly allies.”
― Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez, For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color

“Give your daughters difficult names. Names that command the full use of the tongue. My name makes you want to tell me the truth. My name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone who cannot pronounce it right. —Warsan Shire”
― Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez, For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color

“The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea