Josebud > Josebud's Quotes

“This is a huge evolutionary leap: to be able to see past sameness and likeness as the lens through which we view our potential to care for and love one another. We've done this on the individual level, but we are now organizing on the social level. In many ways this goes against - or extends beyond - the grain of how we have been evolving. Biologically speaking, we are programmed toward beingttribal as a means of survival. We literally have to transcend an aspect of our own biology.
This ability to disrupt our programming and form new cognitive connections based on direct experience that then becomes embodied through repetition -- practice - is one of human beings' greatest attributes. In this lies the potential to overcome our basest reactions for survival and manifest our highest evolutionary potential to thrive. It is profound, and it is possible and we can see it.
May it be so.
Insha'allah
Svaha
Amen”
― Angel Kyodo Williams, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

“So we come upon the radical idea that happiness is not about how many good times we've had and bummers we haven't had, but from being willing to greet life as it occurs, to meet it and respond in its gush and flow. We don't attach ourselves to the contents of life, but we celebrate the very process of being alive.”
― Christine Caldwell, Getting Our Bodies Back: Recovery, Healing, and Transformation through Body-Centered Psychotherapy

“Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women’s silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt.”
― Thomas Sankara, Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle

“I have never seen a person no matter what age, look, ability, height, this or that be passionate about life and not be beautiful.”
― Minna Salami, Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone

“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
― David Bowie

“My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent—strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they'd really lost. All across the country, people felt they'd really won. All across the country, people felt they'd done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland. All across the country, people looked up Google: Irish Passport Applications. All across the country, people called each other cunts. All across the country, people felt unsafe. All across the country, people were laughing their heads off. All across the country, people felt legitimised. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder. All across the country, people felt history meant nothing. All across the country, people felt like they counted for nothing. All across the country, people had pinned their hopes on it. All across the country, people waved flags in the rain. All across the country, people drew swastika graffiti. All across the country, people threatened other people. All across the country, people told people to leave. All across the country, the media was insane. All across the country, politicians lied. All across the country, politicians fell apart. All across the country, politicians vanished...”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“If people think you like them, Charlotte said, well, it can go either way. There’s a lot of powerplay in liking and being liked. Such a powerful connection, it’s a chance to make the world bigger for someone else. Or smaller. That’s always the choice we’ve got.”
― Ali Smith, Summer

“I suppose the fact that we're all a lot more accustomed to blatancy these days means that blatancy itself has to get even more blatant, her mother says.”
― Ali Smith, Summer

“A person’s troubles are not measured by the size of those troubles, but by how much they weigh on the individual carrying them.”
― Jessica George, Maame

“But forest fires, as painful as they can be, bring growth. They spur growth that was impossible before the fire, when old trees crowded out new plants on the forest floor. In the midst of this fire, I already see new life—young people engaged as never before, and the media, the courts, academics, nonprofits, and all other parts of civil society finding reason to bloom.”
― James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

“Without inner change there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.”
― angel Kyodo williams

“You know', I said, 'I have come to dislike museums.’ 'Why is that?’, she asked. 'It is where art comes to die.”
― Percival Everett, So Much Blue

“Firstly, we must widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first-world cultures.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

“I am a superficial woman of depth.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“Validation is my main bitch.”
― Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays

“Birds are masterpieces of nature. The fluid beauty in their colors and their physical form is living art. Their every subtle and conspicuous movement - the undulating traverse of the wren, the high step of the heron, the dance of the crane, and the contemplative blink of the owl — is poetry. Wheeling, pitching, pivoting, swooping and swerving are an aesthetic.”
― Jack Emerson Davis, The Bald Eagle: The Improbable Journey of America's Bird

“Greta liked to think of herself as having experienced everything except childbirth, enlightenment, prison, one or two other things but going to bars with Big Swiss was entirely new. It was like having drinks with a Richard Serra sculpture.”
― Jen Beagin, Big Swiss

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“I live in constant awe of my body
and what it can do. I cut my hand chopping onions
and within hours the body has reconnected the skin. My skeleton replaces itself ten times
over the course of my life time and somehow it never makes a sound. I do not make the choice to breathe, my body does it for me.
There are sixty-thousand miles of blood vessels in my body and every single centimeter keeps me alive.”
― Clint Smith, Above Ground

“It took me too long to understand why I felt compelled to write, but eventually I realized that my life experiences had offered me the merit of something unique to say.”
― Ziwe, Black Friend: Essays

“Talkers aren't listeners”
― Christopher McDougall, Running with Sherman

“Most of us whipsaw back and forth all day, racing to save time so we can sit around and waste it.”
― Christopher McDougall, Running with Sherman

“Fury spends itself pretty quickly when there's no fury facing it.”
― John Lewis, March: Book One

“We, the Palestinians, became the victims of the victims.”
― Colum McCann, Apeirogon

“Old things deserve respect. Makes me feel bad whenever Dad and I do our job, clearing trees for the forestry service. All of them trees earned their rings, then thwack, gone.”
― Shane Hawk, Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology

“…there is no joy without suffering, and it is both the joy and the suffering that make me who I am.”
― Esau McCaulley, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.”
― Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident