Keesha > Keesha's Quotes

“To me, it is far nobler to create my own meaning derived from that around me, using my critical faculties, than to accept unquestioningly the meaning that a superdeity has enforced upon me. The same with beauty and the universe around us. There is something worth dwelling on in that notion that we don’t need for a god to cause and define that universe—that beauty, that spectacle—when we are appreciating it. Whether it be an incredibly complex yet symmetrical mathematical equation, a butterfly’s wings or the expansive Hubble space telescope pictures of nebulae and clouds of space dust and gases, there is much to marvel at in the universe. It’s even more marvelous that there is no painter at nature’s easel.”
― Jonathan MS Pearce, Filling The Void: A Selection Of Humanist And Atheist Poetry

“Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws. The ever-sleepless sea in its bed, crying out “how long?” to Time; million-formed and never motionless flame; the contemplation of these two aspects alone, affords me sufficient food for ten spans of my expected lifetime. It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such. However, I would not, by word or deed, attempt to deprive another of the consolation it affords. It is simply not for me. Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn, is glory enough for me. I know that nothing is destructible; things merely change forms. When the consciousness we know as life ceases, I know that I shall still be part and parcel of the world. I was a part before the sun rolled into shape and burst forth in the glory of change. I was, when the earth was hurled out from its fiery rim. I shall return with the earth to Father Sun, and still exist in substance when the sun has lost its fire, and disintegrated into infinity to perhaps become a part of the whirling rubble of space. Why fear? The stuff of my being is matter, ever changing, ever moving, but never lost; so what need of denominations and creeds to deny myself the comfort of all my fellow men? The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings. I am one with the infinite and need no other assurance.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

“The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think. It’s an extraordinary declaration, asserting that the unknown need not be turned into the known through false divination or the projection of grim political or ideological narratives; it’s a celebration of darkness, willing – as that “I think” indicates—to be uncertain even about its own assertion. Most people are afraid of the dark. Literally when it comes to children, while many adults fear, above all, the darkness that is the unknown, the unseeable, the obscure. And yet the night in which distinctions and definitions cannot be readily made is the same night in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“If, for whatever cruel twist of fate, the God of the Bible exists, I want no part of him. I, along with what I hope is the vast majority of humanity, am better than him. I know more than he ever taught. I see beyond horizons that he could never reach. I love more genuinely than He. I help more than He. I understand myself better than He ever could. I see planets, stars, solar systems, galaxies just on the edge of humanity’s perception. I can even sometimes catch a small glimpse of our universe, and all the wonder and beauty it holds. Your god is too small for me.”
― Atheist Republic, Your God Is Too Small: 50 Essays on Life, Love & Liberty Without Religion

“Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”
― Etty Hillesum

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I’ve perpetually found myself convinced that I can’t live a life that makes sense without understanding my imminent death and making a real effort to incorporate the idea of mortality into my worldview. I feel like if I don’t connect with that, my life gets lost in a series of fast food moments – my actions and relationships and thoughts veer toward easy answers, perpetual consumption, comfort and convenience valued above all else with no sense of meaning underneath. I forget to hold onto the passion of being alive, falling into taking it for granted, into that grind of production and consumption that becomes daily life. Everything becomes easy, neat, packaged, tidy, thoughtless. Every day becomes the same thing, the same color and shape and taste, like life itself should come with fries if you want them. And”
― Tim McBain, The Scattered and the Dead

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Girls do what their mothers tell them. Ladies do what society tells them. Women make up their own minds.”
― Karen Kijewski

“Our aging Faces & scars, ruptured minds. Tired, shredded Spirituality. Beings, Reasons. A reality plank. Love. Every disappearing Quantum comma. What the sun wants us as. Back to earth, consider centuries. Consider Generations of our DNA, forward & backward. There are no ghosts. There is no Mystery. We are always atoms.”
― Ron Androla, Quantum Aquarium

“I’m dancing in my own corpse. Over dramatic and ripe with error.”
― Philip LoPresti, I Am Suicide

“Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned--I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to share your dogma, rapture, or necrodestination.”
― Frank Zappa

“How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.”
― William S. Burroughs

“Cluster-fucks used to be spread wide Between years. Now I live in the middle Of continuous, hourly cluster-fucks.” I am ravaged, & sleepy.”
― Ron Androla, The Water Of Mars

“If I were the earth it would disgust me, all this vermin on my back, I’d shake it off.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“If you point out that they’re walking in shit they scream it’s you that have dirty feet.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“What if I’m just a sick animal? A creature shuffled into existence here by the random whims of evolution. Nothing more. An existence totally without inherent meaning, totally without purpose. What”
― Tim McBain, The Scattered and the Dead

“We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.

Remembered line from a long-
forgotten poem”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels

“It always amused me to observe the pathetically desperate hunger expressed in popular culture for life-forms on other planets, when underneath the very feet of these seekers of aliens, and roundly ignored by them, were the most exotic, grotesque, and fabulous life-forms imaginable.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas. Kennedy himself was 9/10ths the way around the clock or he wouldn't have accepted such an enervating and enfeebling job -- meaning President of the United States of America. How can I be concerned with the murder of one man when almost all men, plus females, are taken from cribs as babies and almost immediately thrown into the masher?”
― Charles Bukowski, Charles Bukowski: Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters 1963-1993

“What do the good know?’ he said. ‘Except what the bad teach them by their excesses?”
― Clive Barker, The Forbidden

“And it’s the same thing everywhere all the time whether they’re stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it’s the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I’d rather stay at home reading a thriller although they’ve become so dreary nowadays. The TV too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“There is nothing that can be found in religion that one can't find in various forms of philosophy.”
― Atheist Republic, Your God Is Too Small: 50 Essays on Life, Love & Liberty Without Religion

“everyone is entitled to their opinion. But the clear distinction in my mind is that I don't hate people, I hate ideas. I don't hate Christians or Muslims or Jews, but I do hate the doctrines and dogma they subscribe to.”
― Atheist Republic, Your God Is Too Small: 50 Essays on Life, Love & Liberty Without Religion

“I carry a chunk of a Poem in my mind. I Have it against a black Wall, words wrap around It, around my hand around Its neck, floods of whistling Spiders.”
― Ron Androla, The Water Of Mars

“There were more times than not that Hayley wished she could shut off her brain for a few hours, give it a rest, but so far she hadn’t figured a way to quiet the beast.”
― T.R. Ragan, Almost Dead

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway