Commiseration Quotes

“And when I came in with tears in my eyes, you always knew whether I needed you to hold me or just let me be. I don't know how you knew, but you did, and you made it easier for me.”
― nicholas sparks, The Notebook

“I think we will send you money periodically. Not that money will solve anything, since you’re alone, broke, unsettled, and unreliable. But we’re all unreliable and broken somewhere inside and sometimes it seems desperately attractive to be unrooted and breaking nothing but your own solitude. That’s how people find each other, and understand.”
― Natalia Ginzburg, Caro Michele

“The indifference of trees to the historical moment. The indifference of dreams to interpretation. The indifference of the people to its own triumph. The indiffer ence of the body to the revolution. The dazzling metaphysical spectacle of the sameness of faces the morning after the revolution. Their features haven't changed. You expect a violent illumination and yet it's just like sleeping with your sister. It doesn't change your life.

There is an equal violence in taking the defence of the victims of violence, for commiseration is obscene. Physical violence does not wound its victim in his sovereignty. Pity or solidarity strike him precisely there, in his pride, in what is inhuman in man, what is cruel and haughty in him towards himself.
Cruelty has as its target man capable of being more than he is; pity has as its target man guilty of being just as he is.
If solidarity merely means sharing a wretched fate, as it does most of the time these days, then it is itself nothing but a form of abjection.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“A few hours later, the five-year-old girl who'd presented with diarrhea, weight loss, and terrible stomach cramping was throwing up a foot-long worm into a bucket and looking very pleased with herself. She spoke not a word of English but kept pointing to herself then the worm then herself and grinning. Her mother, who also spoke not a word of English, was doing the same, gesticulating wildly back and forth between daughter and worm, but her face wore the opposite expression. She was not screaming in a language Rosie knew, but she understood clear as lagoons anyway the mother's horror of his worm that had lately come out of her little girl. If they'd spoken the same language, Rosie would have laid her hand on the woman's shoulder to commiserate: Oh the things that hide secretly in our children, lying in wait, doing untold damage, yearning to be free. Alarming us beyond all measure.”
― Laurie Frankel, This Is How It Always Is

“What we had actually demonstrated was our cowardice, but there is fellowship in that too.”
― Clifford Geertz

“But all those fu*ked-up messy feelings are what make us human. And they are so Godd*mn important.”
― James Tynion IV