Nora Biernat > Nora's Quotes

“Even though you won't believe me
my story is beautiful
And the serpent that sang it
Sang it from out of the well.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own set of facts.”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“I reckon when the darkness is close to us it is a friend. But when we sorter push it away from us—divorce ourselves from it, so to speak, with lantern light—it becomes an enemy.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables Stories

“Reason must know the heart's reasons and every other reason”
― Leonora Carrington

“Darling stop being philosophical, it doesn’t suit you, it makes your nose red.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It's not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can't even remember your name.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?”
― Immanuel Kant

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
― Aristotle

“There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
― Audre Lorde

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
― audre lorde

“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.”
― Audre Lorde

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”
― Audre Lorde

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”
― Audre Lorde

“The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.”
― Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

“Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
― Audre Lorde

“... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”
― Audre Lorde

“The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”
― Albert Camus

“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“It is better to beg forgiveness, than ask permission.”
― Grace Murray Hopper