Quotes, Poems, & Sayings...

[Kobi]

Journalist, novelist, writer.

A syndicated columnist for the New York Times and later a contributing editor and columnist for Newsweek, Anna Quindlen began her career in more traditional reporting assignments, moving to a column about New York daily life, and then writing her long-running bi-weekly column while spending more time at home raising three children. Anna Quindlen has also written novels, non-fiction books, and children's books. She is notable for her ruminations on life from the perspective of a woman.

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• Just as we fooled ourselves that the end of discriminatory laws would soon lead to racial harmony, so we thought that increased access to education, advancement and male-only arenas would erase the attitudes that have led some men to treat women like children, fools and punching bags.

• This sense of otherness is the single most pernicious force in American discourse. The not-like-us ethos makes so much bigotry possible: Racism, sexism, homophobia. It divides the country as surely as the Mason-Dixon line once did. And it makes for mean-spirited and punitive politics and social policy.

• But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on.

• We want things to be easy for our children, and we know from sad experience that the world can be unkind to girls who do not please, who speak out, who go their own way. But we know from experience, too, that the role of the good girl can be a hollow one, with nothing at the center except other people's expectations where your character might have been.

[girl_dee]

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
Edgar Allan Poe

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
John Lennon

[JAGG]

It is better to have men ask why you have no statue, than why you have one. -Unknown

What we do not understand we do not possess. -Goethe


It is double the pleasure to cheat a cheater. -Jean de la Fontaine

[Spirit Dancer]

We don't recieve wisdom; we must diiscover it for ourselves, after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

~ Marcel Proust ~

[Fancy]

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

~William Shakespeare

[puddin']

"you don't become great by trying to be great. you become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process." ~madame curie

[Talon]

It is difficult to know at what moment love begins...
It is less difficult to know that it has begun.


~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[Semantics]

Although lovable (her signature tic, that absentminded way of blowing her hair out of her face couldn’t be surpassed in charm by Audrey Hepburn),
also blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat—
graceful, unreasonable and impractical no matter what she was draped over, whether couches or people
(a quality that didn’t diminish even when she was marginally torn and tatty, as she was now)—
[she] was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians.
She was neither flat nor a solid shape.
She showed no symmetry at all.
Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics all proved useless.
Her Pie Chart was a muddle of arbitrary wedges, her Line Graph, a silhouette of the Alps. And just when one listed her under Chaos Theory—
Butterfly Effects, Weather Predictions, Fractals, Bifurcation diagrams and whatnot—she showed up as an equilateral triangle, sometimes even a square.

Marisha Pessl

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

[Katniss]

I Remember You As You Were
I remember you as you were in the last autumn.
You were the grey beret and the still heart.
In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.
And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.
Clasping my arms like a climbing plant
The leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace.
Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning.
Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul.
I feel your eyes travelling, and the autumn is far off:
Grey beret, voice of a bird, heart like a house
Towards which my deep longing migrated
And my kisses fell, happy as embers.
Sky from a ship. Field from the hills:
Your memory is made of light, of smoke, of a still pond!
Beyond your eyes, farther on, the evenings were blazing.
Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.



Katniss

[Ascot]

Grammar; the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you're shit.

[spiritfemme7]

I want the butch, the whole butch, and nothing but the butch so help me God! lol!

[spiritfemme7]

oh one more good one: Don't hate me because you ain't me!!!! lmao!!!

[Kobi]

Adrienne Rich was first published as a poet in 1951, when she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Her poetry has reflected her own life changes and many roles.

Adrienne Rich's feminism emerged in mid-career, and many of her later poems express a political rage and search for sisterhood and creative language.

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• Women have been the truly active people in all cultures, without whom human society would long ago have perished, though our activity has most often been on the behalf of men and children.

• I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included.

• Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism -- the longing to remain the mother's son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.

• How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

[JAGG]

You are only what you are , when no one is looking. -Robert C. Edwards


To accept a benefit is to sell one's freedom. - Latin proverb


Better to wear out, than to rust out.- Unknown

[Katniss]

VIII
I can see myself years back at Sunion,
hurting with an infected foot, Philoctetes
in woman’s form, limping the long path,
lying on a headland over the dark sea,
looking down the red rocks to where a soundless curl
of white told me a wave had struck,
imagining the pull of that water from that height,
knowing deliberate suicide wasn’t my métier,
yet all the time nursing, measuring that wound.
Well, that’s finished. The woman who cherished
her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.
I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,
but I want to go on from here with you
fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.

Adrienne Rich

Katniss

[Talon]

Love is more than words. It is demonstrated through actions.
Love is manifested in the day-to-day occurrences of small kindnesses and spoken words.
Love is lending a patient ear and taking the time to care.

[spritzerJ]

“Strong men can always afford to be gentle. Only the weak are intent on giving as good as they get.”--Elbert Hubbard

“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.”--Mahatma Gandhi

“No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.”--G. K. Chesterton

“The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed- It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.”--William Shakespeare

“The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.”--Henry David Thoreau

[Kobi]

Feminist, writer, and educator bell hooks (she prefers the lower case spelling) is a social critic concerned with issues of sexism and racism.

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• If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.

• In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.

• As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.

• Since our society continues to be primarily a "Christian" culture masses of people continue to believe that god has ordained that women be subordinate to men in the domestic household.

• I still think it's important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society -- because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not.

• The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance.

[Fancy]

Adventure is worthwhile in itself.

Amelia Earhart

[Spirit Dancer]

Mindfulness makes our eyes, our heart, our non-toothache, the moon, and the trees
deep and beautiful. And when we touch our suffering with mindfulness, we begin
to transform it. Mindfulness is like a mother holding her baby in her arms and caring
for her baby’s pain. When our pain is held by mindfulness it loses some of its strength. . . .
Mindfulness recognizes what is there, and concentration allows you to be deeply
present with whatever it is. Concentration is the ground of happiness.
If you live twenty-four hours a day in mindfulness and concentration, one day is a lot.

Thich Nhat Hanh