#cult

Like most people, my views about ghosts and haunted places were traditional while growing up. I believed ghosts were human spirits. Not that I talked to many people about the subject or my experiences. I assumed people would think I was weird. ↗

— Kristine McGuire

#faith #ghost #ghosts #god #medium

It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change! ↗

— Thom Gunn

#by the time #certain #change #closet #department

You get people talking about being worried about their art, and dances... their culture being wiped out or taken over, and yet these same people are taking advantage of their people to use them as cheap labour. ↗

— Arlo Guthrie

#advantage #art #being #cheap #culture

I think the Lower East Side inspires me. That whole neighborhood, a lot of the people that I worked with, seeing what we've gone through in life, being given an opportunity to understand who I am; my identity, my culture, and my roots. ↗

— Luis Guzman

#being #culture #east #east side #given

Gather in your resources, rally all your faculties, marshal all your energies, focus all your capacities upon mastery of at least one field of endeavor. ↗

— John Haggai

#endeavor #energies #faculties #field #focus

A man's love, till it has been chastened and fastened by the feeling of duty which marriage brings with it, is instigated mainly by the difficulty of pursuit. ↗

— Anthony Trollope

#brings #difficulty #duty #fastened #feeling

No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter). ↗

— Edward W. Said

#culture #humanity #imperialism #labels #survival

And touring is difficult when everybody's heads aren't in the same place. ↗

— Fred Durst

#everybody #heads #place #same #touring

The main cause of my difficulties stemmed from the tragedy of my daughter's unsound birth and my inability to face my feelings. ↗

— Gene Tierney

#cause #daughter #difficulties #face #feelings

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#define #difficult #express #feelings #her