Andrew Squitiro > Andrew's Quotes

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.”
― richard siken

“They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'Here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets.”
― Jacques Derrida

“As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move.”
― James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.”
― Robert Hass

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”
― Richard Siken

“Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.

In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.”
― Robert Higgs

“Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.”
― Edward Abbey

“You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education.”
― Bob Black, The Abolition of Work and Other Essays

“Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don't give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.”
― Emma Goldman

“An anarchist is someone who doesn't need a cop to make him behave.”
― Ammon Hennacy

“Anarchists have a 'bad name' in the media, not because they can point to one indiscriminate massacre by anarchists--there have been none--but because the one thing holders of power fear is that they personally should be held responsible for their own actions”
― stuart christie

“If crimes are committed they must be seen as a disease, and punishment as treatment rather than as social vengeance.”
― Daniel Guérin, Anarchism

“The sadness that overwhelms us, the retardation that paralyzes us, are also a shield—sometimes the last one—against madness”
― Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

“To be deprived of parents - is that where freedom starts?”
― Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

“And nevertheless, no, I have nothing to say to them, to my parents. Nothing. Nothing and everything, as always. If I tried – out of boldness, through luck, or in distress – to share with them some of the violence that causes me to be so totally on my own, they would not know where I am, who I am, what it is, in others, that rubs me the wrong way.”
― Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

“We found so much to say, to share, to learn.... For it wasn't just the Marquis de Sade profile and the sporty thighs-and-calves that seduced me. It was even more, perhaps, or certainly just as much, the speed at which you used to read, and still do.”
― Julia Kristeva

“We suffer each other to have each other a while.”
― Li-Young Lee

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
― Aeschylus

“The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“[W]hen you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“What can you do when your five senses are not enough?”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation