ronnie

“There was one circumstance that tormented me at that time, namely that nobody else was like me and I wasn't like anybody else. 'I am one person, and they are everybody,' I would think, falling into a brown study. It is evident from this that I was still only a boy.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracle, and at the great moments of their life, the moment of their deepest, most agonizing spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of their heart?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor

“And why are you so firmly and triumphantly certain that only what is normal and positive - in short, only well-being - is good for man? Is reason mistaken about what is good? After all, perhaps prosperity isn't the only thing that pleases mankind, perhaps he is just as attracted to suffering. Perhaps suffering is just as good for him as prosperity. Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering - that is a fact. About this there is no need to consult universal history: ask yourself, if you are a man and have ever lived even in some degree. As for my own personal opinion, I find it somehow unseemly to love only well-being. Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, smashing things is also sometimes very pleasant.”
― fyodor dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own: for instance "I can't possibly teach Black women's writing- their experience is so different from mine," yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another: "She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?" Or, "she's a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?" Or again, "This woman writes of her sons and I have no children." And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals