Precariousness Quotes

“Love, built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.”
― John Donne, The Complete English Poems

“Quick-loving hearts ... may quickly loathe.”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese

“Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“...studies show that in general, optimists die ten years earlier than pessimists."
"I find that hard to believe"
"Of course you do, you're an optimist. You have a misguided belief that things will go your way. You don't see the dangers till it's too late. Pessimists are more realistic.
"That seems like a sad way to govern your life."
"It's a safe way to govern your life.”
― Susin Nielsen, Optimists Die First

“We must acknowledge the utter fragility of what holds our lives together—our institutions, our shared labor, our love, our mourning—and yet keep faith with what offers no final guarantee. This is the double movement of secular faith. (377)”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

“Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, "there is a life that will never have been lived," sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the start.”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

“In other words, they appeal to the state for protection, but the state is precisely that from which they require protection. To be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state, so to rely on the nation-state for protection from violence is precisely to exchange one potential violence for another. There may, indeed, be few other choices.”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

“Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

“I’m not surprised that in a time of hideous precarity so many of us would find ourselves tempted by the false grandiosities of certainty. But we must not confuse certainty with safety — in fact, certainty is the end of the imagination and therefore the definition of unsafety. Nor should we confuse unknowing with ignorance. To unknow is to admit limits, to acknowledge that others might have answers you lack, to recognize our exquisite interdependence as people, and best of all to seek within. To dwell in unknowing is to put your phone away and be for a brief moment completely, imperfectly, human.

In times like ours unknowing is excellent proof against our society’s inhumanity, against the lizard supremacy of certainty.

There is wisdom in the question deferred, the question without an immediate answer. Tolerance and unity, too.

And art, as well, if we can tolerate the fact that we are all forever a question without answers, a beautiful unknown, an infinite unknowing.”
― Junot Díaz

“I argue that even as the war is framed in certain ways to control and heighten affect in relation to the differential grievability of lives, so war has come to frame ways of thinking multiculturalism and debates on sexual freedom, issues largely considered separate from "foreign affairs.”
― Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

“After all, poor people are only as good as their last service to the masters of the system, and it is based on that last service that they get to have one more paycheck for just one more month of uncertainty.”
― Louis Yako

“[Securing Tomorrow]

I watch with sadness
as most people busy themselves
accumulating more money,
winning more promotions,
building larger houses,
buying additional properties
and possessions,
new cars,
ever more goods
and consumer luxuries.
I see them consumed
by the desire to possess
everything their hands can reach,
all in order to secure tomorrow,
to guarantee a life
of comfort and abundance.
Yet few realize
that tomorrow may never come.
And if it does,
it may arrive
sad,
frightening,
and desolate.
Few realize
that it may not rain tomorrow,
that the earth may grow dry,
and that this very obsession
with acquiring more and more
is precisely what will lead humanity
toward its ruin,
after exhausting
every possible form of life.
Few have understood
that fear,
panic,
and the relentless need
to secure tomorrow
are precisely what have made
tomorrow so uncertain.
What a bitter paradox.

7 February 2024”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]