Mo > Mo's Quotes

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Almost every woman I have ever met has a secret belief that she is just on the edge of madness, that there is some deep, crazy part within her, that she must be on guard constantly against ‘losing control’ — of her temper, of her appetite, of her sexuality, of her feelings, of her ambition, of her secret fantasies, of her mind.”
― Elana Dykewomon, Sinister Wisdom 36: Surviving Psychiatric Assault & Creating Emotional Well-Being in Our Communities

“My alone feels so good, I'll only have you if you're sweeter than my solitude.”
― Warsan Shire

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
― Alan Watts

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.”
― Alan Watts

“...nostalgia goes beyond individual psychology. At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time - the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into a private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”
― Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia

“The nostalgic is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local and the universal.”
― Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia

“True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands--whether of individuals or entire peoples--need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“language is never neutral”
― Paulo Freire

“Reading is not walking on the words; it's grasping the soul of them.”
― Paulo Freire

“—Do you have any weapons on you?
—I have a longing that's killing me.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982

“Sometimes you need to slow down to go fast.”
― Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness

“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”
― Emil Cioran

“When you’re being looked at you can’t look. To look is to feel curious, to be interested, to lower yourself. No one you look at is worth it.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“Some birds are shrieking at the tops of their voices, crazy birds.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“You misinterpret everything, even the silence.”
― Franz Kafka, The Castle

“The Talmud states, "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
― Bridges McCall

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Had he known that he was about to enter a tunnel whose only egress was his own annihilation, would he have turned away?”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“She woke to the sound of his heart knocking against his chest. As though it was searching for a way out.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“If anything, she possessed him in death in a way that she never had while he was alive. At least her memory of him was hers. Wholly hers. Savagely, fiercely, hers.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things