The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.
—Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” Crises of the Republic (1972)
The truth is, once you understand that there are people who do not want you to exist, that is a difficult card to remove from the table. There is no liberation, no undoing that knowledge. It is the unyielding door, the one that simply cannot be pushed back against any longer. For many, there are reminders of this every day, every hour. It makes "Alright," the emotional bar and the song itself, the best there is. It makes existence itself a celebration.
—Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
A dream of tenderness wrestles with all I know of history
—Adrienne Rich (1974)
I know that's not what happens in real life, but I know all sorts of things that I don't believe.
—Emily Horne and Joey Comeau, A Softer World webcomic (#392)
Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris. / It is part of human nature to hate those whom you have injured.
—Tacitus, Agricola
Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.
—Terry Pratchett, The Truth (2000)
The elk hesitated. ‘The world is big and cold, little child, and you are so small. The world is full of evil and wickedness, and it will hurt you.’
‘No, no. I am young and warm. I have warmth enough for everyone. I am small and good, and want to share the good I have.’
—Helge Kjellin, “Leap the Elk and Little Princess Cottongrass,” Swedish Folk Tale
History is painted by the winners. Keep your paints wet. Trust me, I have things to say.
—Richard Siken, War of the Foxes
This summer I’ll cut my hair off. This summer I’ll be Jeanne D'Arc. I’ll write the script, I’ll play her life. I’ll burn for what I believe.
—Carole Maso, The Art Lover
Your throat: that box of pain,
Is full of bones and feathers.
—Golan Haji, The Box Of Pain, tr. Golan Haji & Kristina Stoltz
The point from which politics starts for me is hunger. Nothing less.
—John Berger, A Painter of Our Time: A Novel
But for [Antigone] the law is pathological and sadistic, and ethics are ideology.
—Hanif Kureishi, Antigone – If Their Lips Weren’t Sealed by Fear
Writing is a form of freedom more accessible than many and there are forces at work that would like to withhold it from those whose stories most threaten the regimes that govern this society. Fuck them. Write your life.
—Melissa Febos, Body Work
my body a burden to me.
—Louise Glück, "Winter Journey," Winter Recipes From The Collective: Poems
I kneel into a dream where I
am good & loved. I am
good. I am loved. My hands have made
some good mistakes. They can always
make better ones.
—Natalie Wee, Least Of All
In King Lear (III:vii) there is a man who is such a minor character that Shakespeare has not given him even a name: he is merely “First Servant.” All the characters around him—Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund—have fine long-term plans. They think they know how the story is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such delusions. He has no notion how the play is going to go. But he understands the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of old Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it. His sword is out and pointed at his master’s breast in a moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is his whole part: eight lines all told. But if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted.
—C.S. Lewis
Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It's
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.
—Richard Siken, Litany In Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out
The anger was vast and it came out of nowhere. It was the rage of something not fitting; the frustration of trying to put something in a box that is slightly too small. You try moving the shape around in the hope that some angle will make it fit in the box. Slowly comes an apprehension that this might not, after all, be possible. And finally you know it won’t fit, know there is no way it can fit, but this doesn’t stop you using brute force to try to crush it in, punishing the bloody thing for not fitting properly. That was what it was like: but I was the box, I was the thing that didn’t fit, and I was the person smashing it, over and over again, with bruised and bleeding hands.
—Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
I sat on a gray stone bench / ringed with the ingenue faces / of pink and
white impatiens / and placed my grief / in the mouth of language, / the
only thing that would grieve with me.
—Lisel Mueller, Alive Together, “When I Am Asked”
Come to my quietness I shall cover you with it, like a white sheet that has blown all day in the sun, like a mountain lake filled with spring, it shall slip over you
—Diane di Prima, Selected Poems, 1956-1975 (North Atlantic Books, 1975)
How can I know? I don't want to be pitied and I don't know how to be loved. I only know how to love. All I can do is hope I'm doing the right thing.
—Keith Haring
& how many times have you loved me without my asking?
how often have i loved a thing because you loved it?
including me
—Danez Smith, Acknowledgements
I have seen you and I have loved you regardless. / I have watched you and I have held on to your shaking hands and I have wiped tears from your cheek and here I am, / in spite in spite in spite. / You do not need to be good to be loved. You need only be.
—Neta L
In this space right here that we have made for each other, you can say anything and I will not abandon you. Unwrap the worst things you have done. Watch me hold them up to the light and not even flinch.
—Trista Mateer
To the query, “What is a friend?” his reply was, “A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
—Aristotle, quoted by Diogenes Laërtius in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (3rd c. C.E.)
I will bear him wherever I am taken and no one will kill him and he will not die.
—Donika Kelly, The Renunciations, “Self-Portrait with Door”
Do you see now? My tongue the dagger at your jugular. My love the sword at your bosom. Which do you want? Both, of course – both, always both, greedy hands stretching out into the dark and suddenly it is the dagger at my throat and the dagger over my heart and I am crying out please, please, I always meant to kill us both.
—Venetta Octavia, I SET IT IN STONE
I don’t want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.
—George Bataille, My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man
You who hunger, who shall feed you?
Come to us, we too are starving.
Only hungry ones can feed you.
—Bertholt Brecht, All or Nothing
In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again who we love.
—Frank O’Hara
I: Why not take the shorter way home.
HT: There is no shorter way home.
—Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours, “Interview with Hara Tamiki (1950)”
I think you have to hope, and hope in this sense is not a prize or a gift, but something you earn through study, through resisting the ease of despair, and through digging tunnels, cutting windows, opening doors, or finding the people who do these things.
—Rebecca Solnit, Hope In The Dark
And we danced too, you know, at weddings and wakes, in basements and churches, even when the war was on.
——J.P. Grasser, Letter to My Great, Great Grandchild
Why do nondisabled people want to prevent our births or expedite our deaths? Is it because we are simply too cool?
—Jillian Weise
There are some things that it is better to begin than to refuse, even though the end may be dark.
—J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
The recovery of the outcasts demanded reduction of the privileges of the powerful, so the excluded who became aware of their exclusion had to be branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine. And for their part, blinded by their exclusion, they were not really interested in any doctrine. This is the illusion of heresy. Everyone is heretical, everyone is orthodox. The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.
—Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Monsters rebel not because they are infected by the evils of the godless radical philosophy, but because they have been oppressed and misused by the regnant order.
—Slavoj Žižek, In Defense Of Lost Causes
Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power.
—Hannah Arendt, 1967 remark, quoted by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in Hannah Arendt (1982)
For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
As soon as we die, we enter into fiction. Just ask two different family members to tell you about someone recently gone, and you will see what I mean. Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted.
—Hilary Mantel, Why I Became a Historical Novelist (2017, The Guardian)
History is made up of fragments and absences. What is left out is as significant as what is included.
—Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
History is written by the victors, but art is mostly chronicled by the disfranchised.
—Guillermo del Toro, The New Annotated Frankenstein (2017), “Introduction: Mary Shelley, or the Modern Galatea”
people need a monster they can believe in. A true and horrible enemy. A demon to define themselves against. Otherwise, it’s just us versus us.
—Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.
—G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State (1922)
The only violence he's ever been involved in is this, which was to have himself executed.
—Dick Harpootlian, quoted as the lawyer of a lawyer charged with fraud after asking a client to kill him
[…] all the distance, prejudice, and misconstrual engendered by an objective posture.
—Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis
You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
As for the poem, not this poem but any
poem, do you feel its sting? Do you feel its hope, its entrance to a community? Do you feel its hand in your hand?
—Mary Oliver, Blue Horses, "Good Morning”
I think it’s because the minute they [poets] are dead all of their poems about death become poems about being alive.
—Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack and Honey (Wave Books, 2012), “Short Lecture on the Dead”
Writing a poem is not so very different from digging a hole. It is work. You try to learn what you can from other holes and the people who dug before you. The difficulty comes from people who do not dig or spend time in holes thinking that the holes ought not to be so wet, or dark, or full of worms. “Why is your hole not lined with light?” Sir, it is a hole.
—Heather Christle, in Black Women Writers (1984, ed. Mari Evans), “A Candle in a Gale Wind”
Lysander said that the law spoke too softly to be heard in such a noise of war.
—Plutarch, Life of Caius Marius
Nothing has to be true forever. Just for long enough.
—Terry Pratchett, The Truth (2000)
What if you let someone who loves you rewrite your story? Who would you be?
—Molly Templeton, Ten Years Later, There’s Still Nothing Like Tarsem Singh’s The Fall
I'll rewrite this whole life and this time there'll be so much love, you won't be able to see beyond it.
—Warsan Shire, Backwards
How to care for the injured body, the kind of body that can’t hold the content it is living?
—Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
Do not imagine, because I am silent, that I am not present, and alive, to all that is going on.
—Samuel Beckett, The Collected Shorter Plays
You cannot save people. You can only love them.
—Anaïs Nin, “A Journal of Love”: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1937-1939, “Nearer the Moon”
But sometimes words are the only
hands / we have to touch a bruised memory / or cleanse a wound that
never healed / or lift a body we carried for years / at last to the pyre of shared grief.
—Fred Dings, Eulogy for a Private Man, “Words”