junah

“How can you know what you want or feel or think—who you are—if you don't know which way history's marionette strings are tugging? [...] People aren't puppets, and to pull a person is to create the conditions for rebellion. Maybe we're more like butterflies, pinned live and wriggling onto history's collage.

If, as I have been convinced, the point of life and the meaning of freedom is to make something with what the world makes of you, then it's necessary to locate those places where history reaches through your self and sticks you to the board.”
― Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

“In a revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are a meaningless chaos and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

“If the value of a drama lies merely in its final and main thought, then the drama itself would be a very long, crooked and laborious way to its goal; and so I hope that history may not see its significance in general thoughts as a kind of bloom and fruit: rather that its value is just this, to describe with insight a known, perhaps common theme, an everyday melody, to elevate it, raise to a comprehensive symbol and so let a whole world of depth of meaning, power and beauty be guessed in it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

“He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance.”
― James Salter