Sophia > Sophia's Quotes

“Don't fight the system, mock the system”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“In any society built on institutionalized racism, race mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race mixing proves that races can mix, and in a lot of cases want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength,” he finally told them, “is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“It is important for our white citizens always to remember that the Negroes alone of all our immigrants came to America against their will by the special compelling invitation of the whites; that the institution of slavery was introduced, expanded and maintained by the United States by the white people and for their own benefit; and they likewise created the conditions that followed emancipation. Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro’s making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance.…”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, desserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“We live in a pretty apathetic age, yet we’re surrounded by an enormous amount of information about other people. If you feel like it, you can easily gather that information about them. Having said that, we still hardly know anything about people.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you're having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I'm fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I'm not falling apart. I'm just lazy. Why it's better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I'm not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“Age certainly hadn't conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“The morning air of the pasture turned steadily cooler. Day by day, the bright golden leaves of the birches turned more spotted as the first winds of winter slipped between the withered branches and across the highlands toward the southeast. Stopping in the center of the pasture, I could hear the winds clearly. No turning back, they pronounced. The brief autumn was gone.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“Most of us, I believe, admire strength. It's something we tend to respect in others, desire for ourselves, and wish for our children. Sometimes, though, I wonder if we confuse strength with other words—like 'aggression' and even 'violence'. Real strength is neither male nor female; but it is, quite simply, one of the finest characteristics that a human being can possess.”
― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

“The values we care about the deepest, and the movements within society that support those values, command our love. When those things that we care about so deeply become endangered, we become enraged. And what a healthy thing that is! Without it, we would never stand up and speak out for what we believe.”
― Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

“I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“A great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“It's a funny thing about capitalism: money you lose by slowing down is always more important than money you've already made.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko