Ash > Ash's Quotes

“The means of communication, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers to the producers and, through the latter to the whole social system. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior.”
― Herbert Marcuse

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling

“You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.
That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“Each others' lives are our best textbooks.”
― Gloria Steinem

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.”
― Alice Walker

“Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm. ”
― Alice Walker

“In nature, nothing is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they're still beautiful.”
― Alice Walker

“Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.”
― Alice Walker

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”
― Audre Lorde

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

“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. ”
― 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

“When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people.”
― John Steinbeck

“Anything that just costs money is cheap.”
― John Steinbeck

“Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.”
― Naomi Klein

“You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”
― Adrienne Rich

“When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”
― Adrienne Rich

“Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.”
― Adrienne Rich

“The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

“Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls.”
― Adrienne Rich

“For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.”
― Adrienne Rich

“There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“The little girl on the plane
Who turned her doll's head around
To look at me.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“We all know that a book is not really a person. It isn’t a human being. But if you are a lover of books as books – as objects, that is – and ignore the human element in them – that is, their voices – you will be committing an error of the soul, because you will be an idolator, or else a fetishist.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
― Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays