“I’m not sad, but the boys who are looking for sad girls always find me. I’m not a girl anymore and I’m not sad anymore. You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘Wow, isn’t he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?’ You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.” — Warsan Shire
Archive for the ‘Quotes’ Category
Tuesday, March 8th, 2016
I am astounded by the number of people I talk with who honestly believe that the road to ‘all one’ equality doesn’t necessitate the work of actually acknowleding and addressing the ways in which our societal structures have created unequal circumstances.
Sunday, October 18th, 2015
“Letting go of a relationship is letting go of a form. It occurs when the love that you are cannot be expressed in the container of the relationship, in the form that it is in. For as your heart has continued to grow and expand, you may find that the current form of your relationship does not allow you to express all the love that you are. When this happens, your soul will find ways to free you, to help you build a new form. Wether it is you or the other person who physically draws away, it is always because the relationship has been a success and all the love that you can express has been expressed, and there now needs to be a new form for you to express all the love that you are now capable of giving. The purpose of every relationship is to open your heart, to allow you to become more loving to yourself and to others. Think now of how you have become more loving since you started this relationship… Congratulate yourself on the expansion of your heart, on your greater capacity to love. The ‘you’ that is even more open now, more loving, more kind, more gentle, more open, more understanding.” -Orin
Monday, October 12th, 2015
“If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements.
If you don’t want it badly enough, you make excuses.” — Hanif Kureishi
Monday, October 12th, 2015
“Twenty years ago, if you had told me I would be doing what I’m doing now I would have said you’re crazy. There is no way I would have believed you.
We each walk a path that is our own. It isn’t always pretty. It can be painful. Messy. Destructive. And we experience things that shape us for better or for worse. I fought my path tooth and nail for a good chunk of my life. I tried to fill it with things that hurt me. Because I was hurting. I made choices that hurt people. I made choices that hurt myself.
Like many out there, I’ve survived terrible things. Seen things I shouldn’t have. Witnessed atrocious behavior and didn’t speak up.
Somewhere along the way I decided that I wanted to be happy and live a life I could be proud of. I wanted more than being a martyr or victim or to suffer in silence. It was lonely and very difficult. Many times I wanted to give up. I don’t know how I made it sometimes.
Experiencing hardship and challenges is what makes many of us more compassionate and accepting. It did me. And it showed me what I didn’t want in my life.
In my culture we call this kind of idea “ciillanguarteq”. To become aware or conscious of the world around us. We have many awakenings like that in our lifetime. It’s up to us to choose how we process and use those awakenings. It’s up to us to continue to evolve or to fight them.
One of the things I promised myself when I was younger and experiencing hardship was that I would become adept at being able to do as much as I could. Enhance the definition of our Yup’ik word: “cavesratuli”-Somebody who knows how to work on everything. I promised myself I would become an expert in as many things and types of work as I could so I would never be without a job or a way to support myself. That desire came from having nothing.
Another thing I promised myself was I would constantly work at being a better person. Learn. Grow. Change. Because I knew that who I wanted to be wasn’t who I was. That’s the difficult part. It means you have to be able to look at yourself critically and see what needs work. You have to admit your weaknesses. To yourself. And sometimes to others. It means you make the things that don’t work in your life obsolete.
What’s really hard about that, is that sometimes…it means you’ll be alone. If you’ve ever changed while others around you stayed the same, you know it’s a lonely thing to do.
I’m glad I chose the things I did. Even the mistakes.” — Estelle Thomson
Sunday, October 11th, 2015
“You torment yourself wondering how they could not love your burning heart; the answer is, darling, you are not the star you thought you were. You are the fucking universe, and not everyone is an astronaut.”
Friday, August 28th, 2015
“Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.” ― Nayyirah Waheed
Friday, August 28th, 2015
“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself” ― Simone de Beauvoir
Friday, July 24th, 2015
“She made broken look beautiful and strong look invincible. She walked with the universe on her shoulders and made it look like a pair of wings.” — Ariana
Twins
Sunday, May 3rd, 2015“Do you believe in life after delivery?”
‘Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.’
“Nonsense. There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”
‘I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.’
“That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”
‘Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.’
“Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one has ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”
‘Well, I don’t know, but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.’
“Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”
‘She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.’
“Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”
‘Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.’
– Útmutató a Léleknek
Thursday, March 26th, 2015
“What if love never feels safe? What if it was never, ever meant to give you that? What if it comes spinning out of the stars offering something much more radical, creative, and transformative than safety?
What if it wasn’t safety that you were seeking after all, but wholeness and a wild sort of aliveness?
What if no matter how many profound insights you have, how many amazingly powerful awakening experiences you collect, or how convinced you become that you have it all together, that you will always be at risk for the beloved to step in and pull the rug out from underneath the conceptual?
What if it was never going to be like you thought it would?” — Matt Licata
Friday, March 6th, 2015
“Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed masculine and feminine in which half of our human traits are exalted while the other half is devalued. Both men and women participate in this tortured value system. Psychological patriarchy is a dance of contempt, a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation. It is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that has suffused Western civilization generation after generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them.” — Terrence Real
Sunday, February 22nd, 2015
“She buried her ears
into the calm
of his heartbeat
and in a matter of seconds
fell terribly in love
with the way
her loneliness fell
softly and suddenly
asleep
in his chest.”
–Christopher Poindexter
Monday, February 2nd, 2015
“Money is the biggest driver of illness in our human world. It’s gotten so bad that upper-class people do not have normal mammalian responses to others suffering.” -Mariamma Jones
Sunday, February 1st, 2015
“The evil was not in bread and circuses, per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of the games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers which bread and circuses can never appease.” – Admiral Ben Moreell
Say Something
Saturday, January 10th, 2015“Some are quick to use the crabs in a bucket trope, but it’s important to remember that crabs were never meant to be piled in a bucket.” – Ryan Dalton
Fuck your fucking bucket. Fuck your fucking fear. Fuck you for trying to keep me in it with you. Fuck you for trying to hold me down and stop me from climbing out. Fuck you for trying to erase me and minimize me and manipulate me away from my truth. Fuck you for giving me no other choice but to leave you behind.
Fuck you for not coming with me.
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Related: Rock Lobster: Finding Home.
Tuesday, January 6th, 2015
“There are times when we have to stand for justice. And there are times that in standing for justice, we have to turn away from people that we would ordinarily want to be with. That is the difficult part of struggle.” – Bell Hooks
Monday, January 5th, 2015
“Love is challenging in all its forms. Familial love, love in friendship, love in romance. Love in our relationships with ourselves. There are all sorts of definitions for love, all sorts of ideas about what love is. In All About Love, bell hooks talks about love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”. I like that definition, it sounds right. And simple enough in the way a definition of love off simple.
Only it isn’t simple at all. Because in order to extend one’s self for anyone’s spiritual growth, including one’s own, one has to first be capable of extending one’s self, and then be willing to choose to do so.
And extending oneself, for the purpose of anything, let alone love, is really fucking scary.” — Mia McKenzie
