Sarah Dows > Sarah's Quotes

“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
― Sharon Salzberg

“If you truly loved yourself, you could never hurt another.”
― Buddha

“If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly our whole life would change. ”
― Buddha

“Stercus accidit.”
― David Hume

“Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. This was a definition of feminism I offered in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center more than 10 years ago. It was my hope at the time that it would become a common definition everyone would use. I liked this definition because it did not imply that men were the enemy. By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult. It is also broad enough to include an understanding of systemic institutionalized sexism. As a definition it is open-ended. To understand feminism it implies one has to necessarily understand sexism.”
― Bell Hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“If it would destroy [a 12-year-old boy] to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?”
― Tony Porter

“The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: "It's a girl.”
― Shirley Chisholm

“Femininity is wearing shoes that make it difficult to run, skirts that inhibit movement, and underclothes that interfere with blood circulation. It can hardly be coincidental that the clothes men find most flattering on a woman are precisely those that make it most difficult for her to defend herself against aggression.”
― Suzanne Brogger, Deliver Us From Love

“The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.”
― Lucretia Mott

“When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.”
― Shirley Chisholm

“All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing!”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Some people are uncomfortable with silences. Not me. I’ve never cared much for call and response. Sometimes I will think of something to say and then I ask myself: is it worth it? And it just isn’t.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
                    but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
                                                                        but then he’s still left with his hands.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I woke up in the morning and I didn’t want anything, didn’t do anything, couldn’t do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush
through me and it never made any sense, anything.”
― Richard Siken

“He offered her the world. She said she had her own.”
― Monique Duval

“It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.”
― Albert Camus