Julia Higgins > Recent Status Updates

people who cling to their delusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning: a people under the necessity of creating themselves must examine everything, and soak up learning the way the roots of a tree soak up water.

...for now what now appears to be the American identity is really a bewildering and sometimes demoralizing blend of nostalgia and opportunism.

he is a pariah in his own country and a stranger in the world. This is what it means to have one's history and one's ties to one's ancestral homeland totally destroyed.

it is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be

the person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality--for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes.

"...if you've loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort."

...but the roles that we contract are constructed because we feel that they will help us to survive and also, of course, because they fulfill something in our personalities; and one does not, therefore, cease playing a role simply because one has begun to understand it.

...Richard was able, at last, to live in Paris exactly as he would have lived, had he been a white man, here, in America. This may seem desirable, but I wonder if it is. Richard paid the price such an illusion of safety demands. The price is a turning away from, an ignorance of, all of the powers of darkness.

the possibility of liberation which is always real is also always painful, since it involves such an overhauling of all that gave us our identity.

...this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.

To-day all political ideologies claim to be founded on science, to be the result of a 'precise observation of facts.' We all know what self-assurance, what rigidity, what inhumanity... are given to these passions to-day by this claim.

The notion that political warfare involves a war of cultures is entirely an invention of modern times, and confers upon them a conspicuous place in the moral history of humanity.

It may be said that until our own times, 'class hatred,' as a conscious hatred proud of itself, was chiefly the hatred of the laborer for the bourgeois. The reciprocal hatred was much less clearly confessed. Ashamed of an egotism they thought peculiar to their own caste... would not admit even to themselves that it existed, tried to convince themselves and others that it was a form of interest in the common good.

The condensation of political passions into a small number of very simple hatred, springing from the deepest roots of the human heart, is a conquest of modern times.

can you be too much alive? Can you be too happy? Moderate your joys. Oh, balderdash! Down with the philosophers! Wisdom is jubilation. Jubilate, jubilate. Are we happy because we are good, or are we good because we are happy?

The penetration of a torturing certainty within man does not occur without breaking up and pulverizing certain deep elements that are sometimes the man himself. Grief, when it reaches this level, is a panic of all the forces of consciousness. These are fatal crises.

...bullets kill people in their beds, corpses litter the pavement. A few streets away, you hear the clicking of billiard balls in the cafes. The theaters open their doors and play comedies; the curious chat and laugh two steps from these streets full of war.

Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves. All human destiny is this dilemma. This dilemma, destruction or salvation, no fate proposes more inexorably than love.

when you know and when you love you will still suffer. The day dawns in tears. The luminous weep, be it only over the dark ones.

...the prisoners crouched, a hideous obedience was produced by the torture, and all fell silent with the look of chained wolves. Cosette trembled all over; she asked, 'Father, are they still men?'
'Sometimes,' said the man of misery.

'And the world will let you die and fall, because the world lets everything fall and die that is nothing but selfishness, everything that does not represent a virtue or an idea for the human race.'

'Revolutions spring, not from an accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It is, because it must be.'

"The social masses, the very foundation of civilization, the consolidated group of superimposed and cohering interests, the venerable profile of old France, constantly appear and disappear through the stormy clouds of systems, passions, and theories...occasionally, we see a gleam of truth, that daylight of the human soul."

"The descending ladder is a strange one; each of its rungs corresponds to a step where philosophy can set foot, and where we discover one of her workers, sometimes divine, sometimes monstrous."

On Marius' descent into poverty, "...and experienced the undeserved shame and poignant blushes of poverty...crucible into which destiny casts a man whenever she desires a scoundrel or a demigod."