Syrah Linsley > Syrah's Quotes

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”
― Adrienne Rich

“Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.”
― Adrienne Rich

“An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

“There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet”
― Adrienne Rich

“but from here on
I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening

-from "A Woman Dead in Her Forties”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

“Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.”
― Simone Weil

“It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms. ”
― Simone Weil

“Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Some people prefer solitude. They say their peace of mind depends on this.
Others say they would be better off in church.
If you do well, you do well wherever you are. If you fail, you fail wherever you are.
Your surroundings don't matter. God is with you everywhere -- in the market place as well as in seclusion or in the church.
If you look for nothing but God, nothing or no one can disturb you.
God is not distracted by a multitude of things.
Nor can we be.”
― Meister Eckhart

“We are all meant to be mothers of God...for God is always needing to be born.”
― Meister Eckhart

“My Lord told me a joke. And seeing Him laugh has done more for me than any scripture I will ever read.”
― Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings

“Every creature is a word of God.”
― Meister Eckhart

“There’s a place in the soul where you’ve never been wounded.”
― Meister Eckhart

“As St Denys says: they speak most beautifully of God who can maintain the deepest silence concerning him in the fullness of their inner wealth.21”
― Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings

“The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“It is one of those invaluable seeds, from which, since it is impossible to have every experience fully, one can grow something that represents other people's experiences. Often one has to make do with seeds; the germs of what might have been, had one's life been different.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The writer's curse is that even in solitude, no matter its duration, he never grows lonely or bored.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people's perception of you rather than people's perception of you.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The problem has not been finding a place where I belong, which is how a children's book might tell it, but of finding ways of insisting on belonging nowhere.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“Then that's what the Northern Lights are. All the lives that we're not living.”
― Adi Alsaid, Let's Get Lost

“There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
Today God gives milk
and I have the pail”
― Anne Sexton, The Awful Rowing Toward God

“For all you who are going,
and there are many who are climbing their pain,
many who will be painted out with a black ink
suddenly and before it is time,
for these many I say,
awkwardly, clumsily,
take off your life like trousers,
your shoes, your underwear,
then take off your flesh,
unpick the lock of your bones.
In other words
take off the wall
that separates you from God.”
― Anne Sexton, The Awful Rowing Toward God

“You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness into brightness.”
― Sarah Manguso

“Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.”
― Sarah Manguso

“I like writing that is unsummarizable, a kernel that cannot be condensed, that must be uttered exactly as it is.”
― Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments: Essays