The Unknown

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
--Rebecca Solnit

Ghosts

The ghosts that haunt most of us aren't the dead or even the shadows of some other dimension. They're the ghosts of who we weren't but might have been, the ghosts of other selves glimpsed briefly out the window, before everything shimmers and we are drawn away again.
--Todd VanDerWerff

Not Just

If you say to someone who has ears to hear: "What you are doing to me is not just," you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, "I have the right..." or "you have no right to..." They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.
--Simone Weil

Fool's Gold

In 1942, in Brno, my father's family hid a man in the rabbit hutch for a week, until he could be moved. That's all I know of the story, and now it's all I'll ever know. With no one to check me, error will spread like weeds. Which is how the past is transmuted into fiction, and then the fool's gold of history.
--Mark Slouka

Make Up Your Mind

The time to make up your mind about people--is never.
--Philip Barry

Largeness

The Four Horsemen of my Apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out.
--Rebecca Solnit

Intelligence

There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.
--Simone Weil

Involved

You're asking people to be involved. They love that--it's part of our human nature. People want to be asked to do something bigger than themselves.
--Jane Kleeb

On The Edge

Smart people are always on the edge a little bit. I've become more confident in some ways as I've gotten older, but you never can take anything for granted. You always have a little bit of doubt, if you have any sense.
--Robert Duvall

Confederate

The Confederate flag does not merely carry the stain of slavery, of "useful killing," but the stain of attempting to end the Union itself. You cannot possibly wave that flag and honestly claim any sincere understanding of your country. It is not possible.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates

Curiosity

She had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love.
--Gabriel García Márquez

Grand Mystery

Optimism says that everything will be fine no matter what, just as pessimism says that it will be dismal no matter what. Hope is a sense of the grand mystery of it all, the knowledge that we don't know how it will turn out, that anything is possible.
--Rebecca Solnit

Poetry

Poetry is the social act of the solitary man.
--John Butler Yeats

Key Rules

I think one of the key rules to learn in the art of party-going is when to leave with dignity.
--Philip French

Religion

Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion. Faith is almost entirely devoid of content.
--Stephen Prothero

Music

The "omnivore" is the new model for the music connoisseur, and one's diversity of listening across the high/low spectrum is now seen as the social signal of refined taste.
--Eric Harvey

Delay

Time always wins; our victories are only delays; but delays are sweet, and a delay can last a whole lifetime.
--Rebecca Solnit

Difficulty

The hallmark of our contemporary culture is an active resistance to difficulty in all its aesthetic manifestations, accompanied by a sense of grievance that conflates it with political elitism.
--Will Self

Other

I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
--Simone Weil

Rage

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
--James Baldwin

Why

Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?
--Anonymous