arielle

“Idealism without consequences is the pathetic dream of every spoiled brat.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“When students leave my classroom, any classroom, they have to and should face the real world, the best and worst of it. I can only hope they are adequately prepared to navigate the world as it is rather than how we wish it could be. But I also hope they are both realistic and idealistic. I hope that, like me, they search for safety, or work to create a world where some measure of safety, not to be confused with anything as infantile as coddling, is an inalienable right.”
― Roxane Gay, Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business

“If someone's lost a cat, but the cat was the most important thing in their world, to me that needs to be taken seriously -- that's as important as someone else's loss of a person. It's weird that people police grief and decide whose loss necessitates more care.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he died unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden