Julie > Julie's Quotes

“When the fact of your being is used as a weapon against you, the process of relearning who you are and what your value is, is a long one.”
― R. Eric Thomas, Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

“Learning to listen must be the work of settlers on colonized land, of modern societies that treat the earth as a thing to be exploited, and of healthcare workers, as we increasingly encounter existential threats from pandemics, forest fires, catastrophic floods, and global warming, all signs that we are critically out of balance.”
― Rupa Marya and Raj Patel

“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”
― 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

“Thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things. Three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years dying. Oak.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“It’s not a feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling of ‘discovered ignorance”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Oppression is never about humanity or lack thereof. It is, and always has been, about power.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“But when we began talking about Asian concepts of “soft power” — what Ni calls leadership “by water rather than by fire” — I started to see a side of him that was less impressed by Western styles of communication. “In Asian cultures,” Ni said, “there’s often a subtle way to get what you want. It’s not always aggressive, but it can be very determined and very skillful. In the end, much is achieved because of it. Aggressive power I beats you up; soft power wins you over.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“According to Free Trait Theory, we are born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits—introversion, for example—but we can and do act out of character in the service of “core personal projects.”
In other words, introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love, or anything they value highly. Free Trait Theory explains why an introvert might throw his extroverted wife a surprise party or join the PTA at his daughter’s school. It explains how it’s possible for an extroverted scientist to behave with reserve in her laboratory, for an agreeable person to act hard-nosed during a business negotiation, and for a cantankerous uncle to treat his niece tenderly when he takes her out for ice cream.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“I looked over at my neighbor, the song sparrow, and thought about how just a few years ago, I wouldn’t have known its name, might not have even known it was a sparrow, might not have even seen it at all. How lonely that world seemed in comparison to this one! But the sparrow and I were no longer strangers. It was no stretch of the imagination, nor even of science, to think that we were related. We were both from the same place (Earth), made of the same stuff. And most important, we were both alive.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“Ultimately, I argue for a view of the self and of identity that is the opposite of the personal brand: an unstable, shapeshifting thing determined by interactions with others and with different kinds of places.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

“And sometimes I’ll ask what people have recently—say in the last day or two—come to realize they love, a question that at first seems to be difficult for some of them, as they say, “I like” this, or “I like” that, to which I try to lean on them by saying, “No, no, I said, what do you love?” Because sharing what we love is dangerous, it is vulnerable, it is like baring your neck, or your belly, and it reveals that, in some ways, we are all commonly tender.”
― Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

“But if you think of art as something you wonder about, or listen to, or get lost in the making of, as something that might be trying to show you something you do not yet know how to understand, something that, again, unfixes us, perhaps we can practice making and heeding that. And if you imagine a classroom as a place where we do this unfixing work together--where we hold each other, and witness each other, through our unfixing--well, that sounds to me like school.”
― Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

“My parents taught me that the provable, tangible, verifiable things were sacred, that sometimes the most astonishing ideas are clearly profound, but when they get labeled as "facts", we lose sight of their beauty. It doesn't have to be this way. Science is the source of so much insight worthy of ecstatic celebration.”
― Sasha Sagan, For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

“No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos. No matter what happens next, you were here. And even when any record of our individual lives is lost to the ages, that won’t detract from the fact that we were. We lived. We were part of the enormity. All the great and terrible parts of being alive, the shocking sublime beauty and heartbreak, the monotony, the interior thoughts, the shared pain and pleasure. It really happened. All of it. On this little world that orbits a yellow star out in the great vastness. And that alone is cause for celebration.”
― Sasha Sagan, For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

“Days and weeks go by and the regularity of existing eclipses the miraculousness of it. But there are certain moments when we manage to be viscerally aware of being alive. Sometimes those are terrifying moments, like narrowly avoiding a car accident. Sometimes they are beautiful, like holding your newborn in your arms. And then there are the quiet moments in between when all the joy and sorrow seem profound only to you.”
― Sasha Sagan, For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

“Every single one of us appears seemingly from nowhere and then, eventually, returns to nowhere. We are conceived, we grow, and we die, but what happens beyond that is a great, haunting mystery. We grapple with it by marking how and when things change here on Earth, both cyclically and permanently.”
― Sasha Sagan, For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

“Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do... on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there...”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven

“We must risk delight,” he wrote. “We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“Learning how to play guitar is the one thing I always look back on with wonderment. I’m reminded of “What ifs?” every time I pick up a guitar. Where would I be? I have sort of a survivor’s guilt about it that makes me want it for everyone. Not the “guitar” exactly, but something like it for everybody. Something that would love them back the more they love it. Something that would remind them of how far they’ve come and provide clear evidence that the future is always unfolding toward some small treasure worth waiting for. At the very least, I wish everyone had a way to kill time without hurting anyone, including themselves. That’s what I wish. That’s what the guitar became for me that summer and is to me still.”
― Jeff Tweedy, Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc.