Julian Maddock

“I can't be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.”
― James Baldwin

“…prominence and deviance are two ways of standing apart from society’s norms.”
― William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed

“You may be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself.”
― Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

“What I meant, whether or no I managed to say it, was this; that no man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton