"I forget what I was taught. I only remember what I have learnt."
- Patrick White
"I forget what I was taught. I only remember what I have learnt."
- Patrick White
"The particular tragedy of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people is that nobody seems to have learned anything. Israel itself was brought into being partly as a belated and guilty attempt by the world community to help compensate for its complicity in, or at least its inability to prevent, the catastrophic crime of the Holocaust. Of all people, the Jewish people ought to know how it feels to be persecuted en masse, to be punished collectively and to be treated as less than human. For the Israeli state and the collective of often unlikely bedfellows who support it so unquestioningly throughout the world to pursue and support the inhumane treatment of the Palestinian people – forced so brutally off their land in 1948 and still under attack today – to be so blind to the idea that injustice is injustice, regardless not just on whom it is visited, but by whom as well, is one of the defining iniquities of our age, and powerfully implies a shamingly low upper limit on the extent of our species’ moral intelligence. The solution to the dispossession and persecution of one people can never be to dispossess and persecute another."
- “Iain Banks: why I’m supporting a cultural boycott of Israel” in The Guardian, April 5, 2013
"Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."
- Ernest Hemingway (via ohlady)
(Source: chandelierswinging, via awelltraveledwoman)
"The past few years have levied a strange burden of proof on our backs, a burden to account for our hours and days, to prove to all who care to watch from the screens of their phones and computers that we are doing something worthy with our lives. In the meantime, we have forgotten how to be content in being present. We have not been transfixed and emptied since we first believed the lie that all of our experiences must be shared."
- “Undocumented Hours” by Rebecca Parker Payne in Kinfolk, Volume Four
"I don’t understand people who claim that they have no regrets in life; who insist, out of gratitude, pride or ignorance, that they wouldn’t want to change a thing. My life is a raging river of regret, flowing into a sea of shame. There is very little I wouldn’t do differently if given a second chance. I always knew I’d end up feeling this way: It was a setup. Regret was something I worked towards, something I felt I had to earn. And now, naturally, I regret that too."
- “Regrets” by John Tottenham (via braveryandothermyths)
"If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself."
- 1984 by George Orwell (via n-dystopia)
(Source: timethroughrhyme)
"How is it that we can look at one life and say it is more valuable than another one? Look at the infants in the delivery rooms: they are innocent children who have the right to grow up to be educated adults with opportunities in life. Then we fill them with stories that promote hatred and fear. Every human life is invaluable, and so easy to destroy with bullets and bombs or with the accusations and revisionist history that promote hatred. Hatred eats at your soul and takes opportunities away from you. It’s like consuming poison."
- I Shall Not Hate by Izzeldin Abuelaish
"You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, ‘Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn’t love me. He just couldn’t deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me.’ Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll – then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time."
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith
"And each person we let ourselves care about is one more loss somewhere down the line."
- Meredith Grey, “Stand By Me”, Grey’s Anatomy
"‘Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will be their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can’t. On both occasions, the man breathes.’"
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith
