Pragya (Reading Hobbit) > Pragya 's Quotes

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#1

“I can explain myself: If you want to be safe, walk in the middle of the street. I’m not joking. You’ve been told to look both ways before crossing the street, and the sidewalk is your friend, right? Wrong. I’ve spent years walking sidewalks at night. I’ve looked around me when it was dark, when there were men following me, creeping out of alleyways, attempting to goad me into speaking to them and shouting obscenities at me when I wouldn’t, and I suddenly realised that the only place left to go was the middle of street. But why would I risk it? Because the odds are in my favour. In the States, someone is killed in a car accident on average every 12.5 minutes, while someone is raped on average every 2.5 minutes. Even when factoring in that, one, I am generously including ALL car-related accidents and not just those involving accidents, and two, that the vast majorities of rapes still go unreported […] And, thus, this is now the way I live my life: out in the open, in the middle of everything, because the middle of the street is actually the safest place to walk.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

tags: rape

375 likes

#2

“It's interesting the fact that when you are bored times passes slow, when you are interested it passes fast.”
― Deyth Banger

tags: bored, fast, interesting

3 likes

#3

“In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies

tags: humour, ideology, philosophy, toilets

207 likes

#4

“Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear--civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

72 likes

#5

“This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike .”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

tags: humankind

30 likes

#6

“I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

tags: above-and-beyond, assurance, certainty, concealment, confidence, foolishness, humility, intelligence, philosophy, pretentiousness, profound, self-assurance, theory, within

238 likes

#7

“The splendid thing
about falling apart
silently...
is that
you can start over
as many times
as you like.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

tags: deep, deep-thoughts, endings, failures, falling, falling-apart, inspirational, life-lessons, life-path, life-quotes, new-beginnings, positive-thinking, profound, silence

485 likes

#8

“That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter

73 likes

#9

“Study the past if you would define the future.”
― Confucius

tags: direction, future, history, learning, moving-forward, past, strategy

1465 likes

#10

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

tags: evolution, freedom, history, liberation, progress, struggle

1175 likes

#11

“The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

tags: absurd, adoration, creation, dream, evidence, expenses, fantasy, flattery, history, homo-sapiens, industry, lord, lord-god, petulant, prayers, preposterous, ruler, universe

362 likes

#12

“and when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.”
― Ruskin Bond, Scenes from a Writer's Life

tags: beauty, butterfly, childhood, human, human-nature, india, life, love, peace, ruskin-bond, war

731 likes

#13

“Adrian smiled and clasped my hands, taking a few steps toward me. "And as for who you are, you’re the same beautiful, brave, and ridiculously smart caffeinated fighter you’ve been since the day I met you.” Finally, he put “beautiful” at the top of his list of adjectives. Not that I should have cared.

“Sweet talker,” I scoffed. “You didn’t know anything about me the first time we met.”

“I knew you were beautiful,” he said. “I just hoped for the rest.”
― Richelle Mead, The Indigo Spell

tags: adrian-ivashkov, attraction, cute, happiness, love, sydney-sage

201 likes

#14

“It happens like this.

"One day you meet someone and for some inexplicable reason, you feel more connected to this stranger than anyone else--closer to them than your closest family. Perhaps this person carries within them an angel--one sent to you for some higher purpose; to teach you an important lesson or to keep you safe during a perilous time. What you must do is trust in them--even if they come hand in hand with pain or suffering--the reason for their presence will become clear in due time."

Though here is a word of warning--you may grow to love this person but remember they are not yours to keep. Their purpose isn't to save you but to show you how to save yourself. And once this is fulfilled; the halo lifts and the angel leaves their body as the person exits your life. They will be a stranger to you once more.

-------------------------------------------------

It's so dark right now, I can't see any light around me.
That's because the light is coming from you. You can't see it but everyone else can.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

tags: angels, beautiful, love, magic, saviour, soulmate, words

1996 likes

#15

“Excellence is the result of caring more than others think is wise, risking more than others think is safe, dreaming more than others think is practical, and expecting more than others think is possible.”
― Ronnie Oldham

tags: acheivement, caring, dreaming, excellence, expectations, expecting, risking

161 likes

#16

“She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood.

She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

tags: inspirational, poetry

3587 likes

#17

“In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality.

Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore, convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living - a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for NOT acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

tags: convention, tradition

21 likes

#18

“Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses

tags: democracy, justice

95 likes

#19

“Just like freedom, Truth is not cheap. Yet both are worth more than all the gold in the world. But what is freedom, if there is no truth? And what is truth, if there is no freedom? Both are worth fighting for — because one without the other would be hell.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

tags: cause, cheap, corrupt, corruption, cost, cost-of-freedom, death, fight, fighting, freedom, gold, hell, justice, justice-system, liberty, oppressed, oppression, price, regime, slave, truth, world, worth

19 likes

#20

“We may indeed in counsel point to the higher road, but we cannot compel any free creature to walk upon it. That leadeth to tyranny, which disfigureth good and maketh it seem hateful.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, Morgoth's Ring

tags: justice, law, mandos, tyranny

29 likes

#21

“One thing I know: For helping me forget how awful the world is, I prefer her to alcohol.”
― Veronica Roth, Four: A Divergent Story Collection

tags: allegiant, beatrice-prior, divergent, four, insurgent, tobias-eaton, tris, veronica-roth

212 likes

#22

“You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

tags: change, changing, growing-up, growth, journey, leaving, life, life-story, living, london, musician, poetry, self-development, self-knowledge, solitude, songwriter, spiritual-growth, sweden, the-great-perhaps, travelling

288 likes

#23

“The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

141 likes

#24

“To work and create 'for nothing', to sculpture in clay, to know that one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries- this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

tags: absurdism, art

64 likes

#25

“I'm tired of the news. I'm tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren't, and deals so simplistically with what's truly appalling. I'm tired of the vitriol. I'm tired of anger. I'm tired of the meanness. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of how we're doing nothing to stop it. I'm tired of how we're encourageing it. I'm tired of the violence that's on it's way, that's coming, that hasn't happened yet. I'm tired of liars. I'm tired of sanctified liars. I'm tired of how those liars have let this happen. I'm tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I'm tired of lying governments. I'm tired of people not caring whether they're being lied to anymore. I'm tired of being made to feel this fearful.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

131 likes

#26

“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

tags: ali-smith, autumn, brexit, quote

75 likes

#27

“Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.”
― Pablo Neruda

tags: abandonment, cancer, death, friendship, grief, loss, mourning, sadness

225 likes

#28

“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

tags: perception, philosophy, scientific-process, truth

645 likes

#29

“But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

tags: letters, poetry

29 likes

#30

“Why do you ask me questions to which you already know the answer?"
She tapped me on the arm with her painted fan. "To annoy you, dearest.”
― Kate Elliott, Cold Fire

tags: cousins, family

1 likes

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