#irs

Love, like Fortune, favours the bold. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#courage #courage-in-love #falling-in-love #first-love #fortune

Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead. ↗

— Karl Von Clausewitz

#darkest #even #faint #first #follow

We learn to appreciate what we achieve, no matter how small the achievement, because we do it ourselves. - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live ↗

— Rachele Baker

#cancer #courage #diary #hope #inspirational

Dinner was a disaster. Brent introduced himself while staring at my bulge, and I was glad to be shown to our table so that we were seated with a table between us, forcing him to look me in the eye. Apparently, my eyes have moved down to my pecs, though, as that's where he decided to fix his attention throughout dinner. ↗

— Brett Kiellerop

#humor #shallowness #dating

Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You're sizing people up to see if they're worth your time and attention, and they're doing the same to you. It's meritocracy applied to personal life, but there's no accountability. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact - to keep from becoming cold and callous - and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn't spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again. ↗

— Adelle Waldman

#love #the-love-affairs-of-nathaniel-p #dating

My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered. ↗

— Alice Sebold

#inspirational #life-and-death #opening-lines #death

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war. ↗

— Erich Maria Remarque

#death

It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad. ↗

— Frederick Forsyth

#execution #first-line #first-lines #first-sentence #frederick-forsyth

He dropped his voice, so low that Tessa wasn’t sure if what he said next was real or part of the dream darkness rising to claim her, though she fought against it. “I’ve never minded it,” he went on. “Being lost, that is. I had always thought one could not be truly lost if one knew one’s own heart. But I fear I may be lost without knowing yours.” He closed his eyes as if he were bone-weary, and she saw how thin his eyelids were, like parchment paper, and how tired he looked. “Wo ai ni, Tessa,” he whispered. “Wo bu xiang shi qu ni.” She knew, without knowing how she knew, what the words meant. I love you. And I don’t want to lose you. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#jem-carstairs #love #romance #tessa-gray #dreams

I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy... But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head... The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#authoritarianism #bill-of-rights #constitution #democracy #egalitarianism