#author

By today’s standards, if you go by the early morning TV misery shows, my broken home family of mixed parentage siblings was quite normal. ↗

— Hailey Giblin

#holly-wells #ian-huntley #jessica-chapman #maxine-carr #soham

How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "market" put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production? ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#cities #colonialism #exploitation #first-world #human-rights

His ambition was not to become wealthy or to be well known, an image which society for some reason dictates each individual should prescribe to, instead his only ambition was to be at peace with himself, if he could achieve that than anything else he might need would follow. From now on he would question all things in life, but especially the rules and regulations of all authority institutions; he would take nothing on face value and only would accept what he personally knew to undeniably be true. ↗

— Andrew James Pritchard

#choices #freedom-of-expression #inner-peace #questioning-authority #freedom

You see, unlike most writers today, I do not use a computer. I write the old-fashioned way: on the walls of caves. ↗

— Cuthbert Soup

#caves #computer #funny #old-fashioned #writer

But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes. ↗

— William H. Seward

#constitution #devotes #domain #higher #law

We live, all of us, in sprung rhythm. Even in cities, folk stir without knowing it to the surge in the blood that is the surge and urgency of season. In being born, we have taken seisin of the natural world, and as ever, it is the land which owns us, not we, the land. Even in the countryside, we dwell suspended between the rhythms of earth and season, weather and sky, and those imposed by metropolitan clocks, at home and abroad. When does the year begin? No; ask rather, When does it not? For us – all of us – as much as for Mr Eliot, midwinter spring is its own season; for all of us, if we but see it, our world is as full of time-coulisses as was Thomas Mann’s. Countrymen know this, with the instinct they share with their beasts. Writers want to know it also, and to articulate what the countryman knows and cannot, perhaps, express to those who sense but do not know, immured in sad conurbations, rootless amidst Betjeman’s frightful vision of soot and stone, worker’s flats and communal canteens, where it is the boast of pride that a man doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet. As both countryman and writer, I have a curious relationship to time. ↗

— G.M.W. Wemyss

#country-life #countryside #sir-john-betjeman #time #village-life

Powerful to alleviate, to delay, to camouflage, though money is, in the end it lets us down. ↗

— Caryll Houselander

#money #money

The brightest light casts the darkest shadow. ↗

— Jess C. Scott

#books #cyberpunk #dark #dark-elves #ego

And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't. ↗

— Jennifer Donnelly

#lonely #writing #life

Understanding people’s difficulties and—just as crucial—helping people understand their own difficulties and teaching them concrete ways to help themselves will help them better deal with their own lives and, in turn, ours. ↗

— Kathryn Erskine

#empathy #kathryn-erskine #life #mockingbird #people