Devi > Devi's Quotes

“I was a coward. I went to the war.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The town could not talk, and would not listen. "How'd you like to hear about the war?" he might have asked, but the place could only blink and shrug. It had no memory, therefore no guilt. The taxes got paid and the votes got counted and the agencies of government did their work briskly and politely. It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know. ”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty. ”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing?”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“But dying's part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can't pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that's the blessing.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.”
― Arundhati Roy

“Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”
― Arundhati Roy, War Talk

“You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“The only way to get change is not through the courts or — heaven forbid — the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts — music, poetry, dance, painting, writing — "can we really reach each other,”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“All at Once Is What Eternity Is.”
― Kenneth Patchen, Wonderings

“There are so many little dyings
How do we know which one of them
is death?


”
― Kenneth Patchen

“Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?”
― Kenneth Patchen

“Art is not to throw light but to be light...”
― Kenneth Patchen

“God must have loved the people in power, for he made them so much like their own image of him.”
― Kenneth Patchen

“Nobody's a long time.”
― Kenneth Patchen, Poems of Humor & Protest

“I want to buy me a hat with a golden feather & a book with the confessions of God in it”
― Kenneth Patchen, The Journal of Albion Moonlight

“Everyman is me. I am his brother. No man is my enemy. I am Everyman and he is in and of me. This is my faith, my strength, my deepest hope, and my only belief.”
― Kenneth Patchen, Wonderings

“O take heart, my brothers. Even now... with every leader & every resource & every strategy of every nation on Earth arrayed against Her - Even now, O even now, my brothers, Life is in no danger of losing the argument! - For after all .... (as will be shown) She has only to change the subject.”
― Kenneth Patchen, What Shall We Do Without Us?: The Voice and Vision of Kenneth Patchen

“Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we haven't time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
― Georgia O'Keeffe, Georgia O'Keeffe

“I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“To have privilege in one or more areas does not mean you are wholly privileged. Surrendering to the acceptance of privilege is difficult, but it is really all that is expected. What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“Books are often far more than just books.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“You don't necessarily have to do anything once you acknowledge your privilege. You don't have to apologize for it. You need to understand the extent of your privilege, the consequences of your privilege, and remain aware that people who are different from you move through and experience the world in ways you might never know anything about.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“Somewhere along the line we started misinterpreting the First Amendment and this idea of the freedom of speech the amendment grants us. We are free to speak as we choose without fear of prosecution or persecution, but we are not free to speak as we choose without consequence.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays

“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
― Arundhati Roy, War Talk