Meg > Meg's Quotes

“Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

“Everyone is familiar with the slogan "The personal is political" -- not only that what we experience on a personal level has profound political implications, but that our interior lives, our emotional lives are very much informed by ideology. We oftentimes do the work of the state in and through our interior lives. What we often assume belongs most intimately to ourselves and to our emotional life has been produced elsewhere and has been recruited to do the work of racism and repression.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“The struggle of the Black people in the United States for emancipation is a component part of the general struggle of al the people of the world against U.S. imperialism, a component part of the contemporary world revolution. I call on the workers, peasants, and revolutionary intellectuals of all countries and all who are willing to fight against U.S. imperialism to take action and extend strong support to the struggle of the Black people in the United States! People of the whole world, unite still more closely and launch a sustained and vigorous offensive against our common enemy, U.S. imperialism, and its accomplices! It can be said with certainty that the complete collapse of colonialism, imperialism, and all systems of exploitation, and the complete emancipation of all the oppressed peoples and nations of the world are not far off.”
― Mao Zedong

“Malevolence is born of negative feelings like loneliness and sadness and anger. It comes from an emptiness inside you that feels as if it's been carved out with a knife, an emptiness you're left with when something very important has been taken away from you”
― Ryu Murakami

“They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“All attempts to create something admirable are the weapons of evil. You may think you are practising benevolence and righteousness, but in effect you will be creating a kind of artificiality. Where a model exists, copies will be made of it; where success has been gained, boasting follows; where debate exists, there will be outbreaks of hostility.”
― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

“... The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different than the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there”
― Ryu Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“It seemed my whole
life was composed of these disjointed
fractions of time, hanging around in one
public place and then another, as if I were
waiting for trains that never came. And, like
one of those ghosts who are said to linger
around depots late at night, asking
passersby for the timetable of the Midnight
Express that derailed twenty years before, I
wandered from light to light until that
dreaded hour when all the doors closed and,
stepping from the world of warmth and
people and conversation overheard, I felt
the old familiar cold twist through my bones
again and then it was all forgotten, the
warmth, the lights; I had never been warm
in my life, ever.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“We'll all be jokers, in the pack,
Just go harder, in attack.
Dealing's fun, so hurry back,
Enjoy the game, avoid the flak."

But one by one the card players at their fateful table were taken away. The cards were last used when the platoon was down to just four soldiers.
[...]
They were spooked by their cards, not at all liking how the hands fell as they played the game called 'Advance.
"Slow down a bit" kien suggested. "If we leave this game unfinished heaven will grant favours, keeping us alive to return and finish the game. So slow down and we'll survive this battle and continue the game later. "
"You're cunning" said Thanh grinning. "But heaven is not stupid. You can't cheat him. If you play only half the game the old chap up there will send for all four of us and we'll torment each other.”
― Bảo Ninh, The Sorrow of War

“The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.”
― Zhuangzi

“The effect of life in society is to complicate and confuse our existence, making us forget who we really are by causing us to become obsessed with what we are not.”
― Zhuangzi, Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters

“Not to understand is profound; to understand is shallow. Not to understand is to be on the inside; to understand is to be on the outside.”
― Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

“You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating them
like sutras Xuan Zhang fetched from India, testing ways
return might be possible against these homesick inventions,
trace the traveller's alien steps across borders, and in between
discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns
grew out of not knowing whether to return or to stay, and then became home.”
― Boey Kim Cheng, Clear Brightness

“You are being self-pitying."
"I'm nearly done. You don't have much more of this to bear."
"I like you better this way."
"Crushed and broken," Gansey said. "Just the way women like 'em.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“When Gansey was polite, it made him powerful. When Adam was polite, he was giving power away.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I would say that as our struggles mature, they produce new ideas, new issues, and new terrains on which we engage in the quest for freedom. Like Nelson Mandela, we must be willing to embrace the long walk toward freedom.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“The freedom movement was expansive. It was about transforming the entire country. It was not simply about acquiring civil rights within a framework that itself would not change.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“The Warrior fights before he’s taught how. He just fights, and if you hit him he steps forwards towards you”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe