Tate (booktimewithtate)

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely... by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria — which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion

“The nicest thing you can ever do for another human being is see them, and really see them, at that. To be understood is one of most base desires we as people have,”
― Jessa Hastings, The Conditions of Will

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Just because you don’t experience prejudice in your everyday doesn’t stop it from existing for the rest of us.”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea