#definitions

Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on. ↗

— Stephen King

#humor #anger

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions. ↗

— James A. Baldwin

#black #definitions #man #power #refuses

Most controversies would soon be ended, if those engaged in them would first accurately define their terms, and then adhere to their definitions. ↗

— Tryon Edwards

#adhere #controversies #define #definitions #ended

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order. ↗

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#clever #definitions #homely #i #i wish

I don't like definitions, but if there is a definition of freedom, it would be when you have control over your reality to transform it, to change it, rather than having it imposed upon you. You can't really ask for more than. ↗

— Mark Knopfler

#change #control #definition #definitions #freedom

It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we're alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are. ↗

— Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

#behind #body #comes #concern #conform

definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words - that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated my as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving - that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I needed to tell. I no longer wished to read lies as to who & why I was. I knew who I was ↗

— Richard Flanagan

#death

contiguous, adj. I felt silly for even mentioning it, but once I did, I knew I had to explain. "When I was a kid, "I had this puzzle with all fifty states on it--you know, the kind where you have to fit them all together. And one day I got it in my head that California and Nevada were in love. I told my mom, and she had no idea what I was talking about. I ran and got those two pieces and showed it to her--California and Nevada, completely in love. So a lot of the time when we're like this"--my ankles against the backs of your ankles, my knees fitting into the backs of your knees, my thighs on the backs of your legs, my stomach against your back, my chin folding into your neck--"I can't help but think about California and Nevada, and how we're a lot like them. If someone were drawing us from above as a map. that's what we'd look like; that's how we are." For a moment, you were quiet. And then you nestled in and whispered. "Contiguous." And I knew you understood. ↗

— David Levithan

#definitions #love #relationships #love

Consensus: “The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus? ↗

— Margaret Thatcher

#democracy #leadership #politics #leadership

Avant-garde is French for bullshit ↗

— John Lennon

#definitions #art