Avani Bound > Avani's Quotes

“I don't define lust as anything evil or nasty. Lust as defined by me, is the feeling of desire: a desire to eat cake, a desire to feel the touch of another's skin moving over your own skin, a desire to breathe, a desire to live, a desire to laugh intensely like it was the best thing God ever created...this is lust as defined by me. And I think that's what it really is.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world. Nevertheless,”
― Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?”
― Margaret Mead

“Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:

"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.

... The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“I chose cultural anthropology, since it offered the greatest opportunity to write high-minded balderdash.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

“All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.”
― robert owen

“The single most important human insight to be gained from this way of comparing societies is perhaps the realization that everything could have been different in our own society – that the way we live is only one among innumerable ways of life which humans have adopted. If we glance sideways and backwards, we will quickly discover that modern society, with its many possibilities and seducing offers, its dizzying complexity and its impressive technological advances, is a way of life which has not been tried out for long. Perhaps, psychologically speaking, we have just left the cave: in terms of the history of our species, we have but spent a moment in modern societies. (..) Anthropology may not provide the answer to the question of the meaning of life, but at least it can tell us that there are many ways in which to make a life meaningful.”
― Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology

“[T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.”
― Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism

“It is...highly probable that from the very beginning, apart from death, the only ironclad rule of human experience has been the Law of Unintended Consequences.”
― Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins

“Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brains are makeshift structures, opportunistically assembled by Nature over hundreds of millions of years, and in multiple different ecological contexts.”
― Ian Tattersall

“Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!”
― Karl Marx

“You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Salt is born of the purest parents: the sun and the sea.”
― Pythagoras

“The great William Shakespeare said, "What's in a name?" He also said, "Call me Billy one more time and I will stab you with this ink quill.”
― Cuthbert Soup, Another Whole Nother Story

“A torpid heart in agony needs a pen to bleed”
― Munia Khan

“There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.”
― Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction

“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.”
― Edith Wharton

“Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.”
― Edith Wharton

“I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights.”
― Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

“An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”
― Edith Wharton

“Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.”
― Edith Wharton

“It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.”
― Edith Wharton

“Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me what makes skies so blue,
And I'll tell you why I love you.

Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,
Tropisms make the ivy twine,
Raleigh scattering make skies so blue,
Testicular hormones are why I love you. ”
― Isaac Asimov

“I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.”
― Isaac Asimov