"Accountability as I mean it is more about ourselves in the context of the collective. … about recognizing that we are necessary and wanted. … when we are not working to live as our best selves, we are devaluing the time and care that our loved ones offer us."
— Mia Birdsong in her book, How We Show Up #Nonfiction#bookQuote
"A good place to look for wisdom is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents. If you can take off the blinders of the myth of pure evil, you might see some good ideas for the first time."
— Jonathan Haidt #Nonfiction#bookQuote
"Will they play the anthem?” I asked.
“The which?”
‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”
“Oh, the national ballad. What for? This is a ball match, not the Senate.”
At least one bit of jingoistic idiocy hadn’t yet lodged in the national psyche, I thought.
-- from If I Never Get Back by Darryl Brock, published in 1989 and set during baseball's infancy in the late 1860s. Just like his character Sam Fowler, Brock was ahead of his time.
We will make mistakes. We will forget that we belong to one another, and then we will remember again, make amends, and move forward. This is all part of the process.
Kaitlin B. Curtice- Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day
If you're a fan of Stephen King's work and familiar with his universe, then this line in Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower 6) will make so much sense:
"You'll go on with your life. You'll write many stories, but everyone will be to some greater or lesser degree about this story. Do you understand?"
-- Roland Deschain to a young Stephen King, saying the quiet part out loud
From the introduction to The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker: "The slaver is a ghost ship sailing on the edges of modern consciousness. To conclude on a personal note: this has been a painful book to write, and if I have done any justice to the subject, it will be a painful book to read. There is no way around this, nor should there be."
"Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out."
"On the whole, any painter who really knows his craft recognizes that he is moving in the wrong direction right from the initial sketch." -- from José Saramago's 'Manual of Painting and Calligraphy', trans. Giovanni Pontiero
"We could recognize her in an instant, even though we’ve never seen her up close. She’s always with us, a whisper on the wind, a shadow passing over our eyes when we’re looking away." - from the story Last Tour Into the Hungering Moonlight by Gwendolyn Kiste in the anthology of Baba Yaga stories, Into the Forest
"In those streets everyone moved faster than me, but what they didn’t know was that I had already moved too fast, too far, and wished to travel no further."
Gaspery Roberts, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
"There was an entire commune of voices living inside the optician. They were the worst lodgers imaginable. They were always too loud, especially after ten o’clock in the evening. They trashed the optician’s interior. They were many of them, they never paid their rent, and they couldn’t be evicted." -- from
Mariana Leky's What You Can See From Here, translated by Tess Lewis
"You must nevertheless bear in mind what I am about to say to you: in the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right—and of being more just than many others who call themselves more just than the just. ...."
"This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment; and the natural desire of revenge on the unjust is colored by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do. Another unjust city, though different from the first, is digging out its space within the double sheath of the unjust and just Berenices."
"People have been living on earth for thousands of years, and yet they’ve still not learned to be good. How strange." - from The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Douglas Smith
"I cannot write in any other way, and if I have thrown myself into this writing, it was precisely in order to give myself sufficient time to think, to think with time." - from José Saramago's first novel 'Manual of Painting and Calligraphy', translated by Giovanni Pontiero #SundaySentence#BookQuote#quotes#reading@bookstodon
"We lived on this earth. Don’t entrust it into the hands of the destroyers, the barbarians and the ignoramuses." - from a note that was found in Konstantin Paustovsky's writing desk after his death in 1968
I've just started reading Paustovsky's The Story of a Life, which is a collection of the first three of six books of the Ukrainian/Russian writer's memoirs published by NYRB earlier this year. It's kind of a doorstopper, but I already don't want it to end.
"Soulmates, the book and its reader. An amorous coupling that lasts just moments, but at maximum intensity!" - from 'The Censor's Notebook' by Liliana Corobca, translated by Monica Cure