Ketutar Jensen

“we are all inescapably responsible, not only for our own actions, but for our lack of action, the morality and ethic of our silences and our avoidances, the shared guilt of hypocrisy, voyeurism, and cowardice; what might be called the “spectator-sport social conscience.”
― Harlan Ellison, Paingod and Other Delusions

“Nor is he unaware of the torturer's classic procedure: the art of reviling and degrading the victim until he no longer seems human, and is repugnant instead of pitiful. He knows that banal reaction of not participating zealously enough in a partisan act of collective barbarism.”
― marguerite yourcenar

“Lewis! Stop throwing stones! I don't believe you've listened to a single word I've been saying!"
"Yes, I have. You were talking about jugs. I'm listening. I'm listening to you and a dozen other things as well."
"There aren't a dozen other things. There's only the chapel bell, and some men shouting in the boats down on the quay... and a dog barking, and some ducks in the garden below."
"Not bad! You've missed about fifty larks in the sky, and the grasshoppers all round us, and a car changing gear on the hill, and the oars in the rowlocks of that boat putting out, and the children playing, and the goat bells away on the hill behind us, and I think I can hear a smity."
"What a babel it sounds! I'd have said it was a quiet evening."
"So it is. It's so quiet that you can hear every sound in it.”
― Margaret Kennedy, The Constant Nymph

“Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse