Good Bones

GOOD BONES

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I've shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I'll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that's a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
--Maggie Smith

Engage

To bother to engage with problematic culture, and problematic people within that culture, is an act of love.
--Elizabeth Alexander

Sad Stories

"I don't think we need to tell sad stories. Life's too short."
"That's exactly why we have to tell them."
--Ray McKinnon

Abuse

The people who have taken power in the mightiest nation on earth are native speakers of the language of abuse. They live and breathe the rhetoric of control, of gaslighting, of shame. This is how abuse works--not just overtly, but insidiously. It claims territory in your heart. It colonizes your mind until it becomes comfortable. Until it becomes something you can live with, or at least survive.
--Laurie Penny

Trick

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.
--Charles Baudelaire

Influence

No, 2016 is not the worst year ever, but it's the year I started feeling like the Internet would only ever induce the sense of powerlessness that comes when the sphere of what a person can influence remains static, while the sphere of what can influence us seems to expand without limit, allowing no respite at all.
--Jia Tolentino

Predictions

Making predictions is a way of fooling yourself into thinking you know.
--Lance Mannion

Running Away

Trying to run away is never the answer to being a fully human. Running away from the immediacy of our experience is like preferring death to life.
--Pema Chödrön

Lupus

Homo homini lupus. (Man is wolf to man.)
--Latin proverb

Militant

The paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician.
--Richard Hofstadter (1964)

Gas Station

Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.
--Senator John McCain

The Present

Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.
--Leo Tolstoy

Make-Believe

Government requires make-believe. Make believe that the king is divine, make believe that he can do no wrong or make believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God. Make believe that the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people are the people.
--Edmund S. Morgan

Tired

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
--Langston Hughes

Empathy

The premise for empathy has to be equal humanity; it is an injustice to demand that the maligned identify with those who question their humanity.
--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Identity

When you're persecuted on the basis of your identity, you end up feeling that identity more poignantly.
--Iyad el-Baghdadi

Ready

We are oblivious of information until we are ready for it. One day, we feel a resonance, from the soles of the feet to the cranium. Without mediation, without apology, we read ourselves, and know what we know.
--Hilary Mantel

Do Not Do

What is hateful to you, do not do to others. All the rest is commentary.
--Hillel