WC L > WC L's Quotes

“For years mental health professionals taught people that they could be psychologically healthy without social support, that “unless you love yourself, no one else will love you.”…The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Low-income parents do not necessarily make more ‘bad choices’ than parents with higher income, but more of their practices turn out to have negative outcomes. It is more accurate to say that they have bad options for managing the need for money and the need of their kids for care”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“... a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.”
― Malorie Blackman

“I was discovering that I was not afraid of death; rather, I was in awe of it, and of its impact on our lives. What would happen if we ever ‘found a cure’ for death? Immortality seems in many ways an uninviting option. It is the fact that every day counts us down that makes each one such a gift. There are only two days with fewer than twenty-four hours in each lifetime, sitting like bookends astride our lives: one is celebrated every year, yet it is the other that makes us see living as precious.”
― Kathryn Mannix, With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial

“Bran thought about it. 'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?'
'That is the only time a man can be brave,' his father told him.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Inequality, in fact, is a logical outcome of meritocracy. What the education system does when it selects, sorts, and hierarchizes, and when it gives its stamp of approval to those 'at the top,' is that it renders those who succeed through the system as legitimately deserving. Left implicit is that those at the bottom have failed to be deserving.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“In sociological literature, meritocracy is widely recognized as a system for sorting, selecting, and then differentially rewarding people; it is a system for legitimizing the process and outcomes of sorting, based on narrow notions of what is worth rewarding and what is not. And it works well when there is, what Pierre Bourdieu referred to as “misrecognition.” Misrecognition happens when we think that a system is based on a certain set of principles when it really works on the basis of another, when we think it rewards each individual’s hard work when in reality it rewards economic and cultural capital passed on from parents to children.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“The opposite of racist isn't 'not racist.' It is 'anti-racist.' What's the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an anti-racist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“The death rate remains 100 per cent, and the pattern of the final days, and the way we actually die, are unchanged. What is different is that we have lost the familiarity we once had with that process, and we have lost the vocabulary and etiquette that served us so well in past times, when death was acknowledged to be inevitable. Instead of dying in a dear and familiar room with people we love around us, we now die in ambulances and emergency rooms and intensive care units, our loved ones separated from us by the machinery of life preservation.”
― Kathryn Mannix, With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial

“There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
― Roald Dahl, The Twits

“If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”
― Peter Singer

“If you are paying for something to drink when safe drinking water comes out of the tap, you have money to spend on things you don’t really need. Around the world, a billion people struggle to live each day on less than you paid for that drink.”
― Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: How to play your part in ending world poverty

“It was time to be strong,
take a chance ... after all,
Forever was such a long time
to feel small.”
― Rachel Bright, The Lion Inside

“Empathy underlies virtually everything that makes society work—like trust, altruism, collaboration, love, charity. Failure to empathize is a key part of most social problems—crime, violence, war, racism, child abuse, and inequity, to name just a few.”
― Bruce D. Perry, Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential--and Endangered

“Kill the boy, Jon Snow. Winter is almost upon us. Kill the boy and let the man be born.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Be glad. Be good. Be brave.”
― Eleanor Hodgman Porter

“To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“Not responding is a response - we are equally responsible for what we don't do.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“I can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn't know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me."
"He saved your life."
"I didn't eat it."
"You didn't eat it?"
"It was pork. I wouldn't eat pork."
"Why?"
"What do you mean why?"
"What, because it wasn't kosher?"
"Of course."
"But not even to save your life?"
"If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

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