#iv

He held his head, and he cried for them, and he did not melt into the sea but sat, aching, in the glowing moonlight-for in the end our bodies know only how to carry on surviving. That is our strength, and our tragedy. ↗

— Nick Lake

#survival #life

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often - in fact, mostly - at the expense of everything else in my life. ↗

— Stan Getz

#music #musician #perfection #life

Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant "existing things" does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like “woman,” “butch,” “lesbian,” or “transsexual” are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism. ↗

— Gayle Rubin

#diversity #history #identity #labels #lesbian

Do you wait for things to happen, or do you make them happen yourself? I believe in writing your own story. ↗

— Charlotte Eriksson

#choice #dream #fate #goals #inspiration

The world is big in some ways, and so small in others. ↗

— Ashly Lorenzana

#overwhelming #randomness #universe #world #life

[My mum] was always like that: grateful for life itself. Her glass was not only half full, it was gold plated with a permanent refill. ↗

— Sarah Winman

#life

These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could not abide, but which we could not summon on demand, least of all by proceeding in virtuous accordance with an established formula. You regarded redemption as an act of will. You disparaged people (people like me) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fineness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character. You always hated finicky eaters, hypochondriacs, and snobs who turned their noses up at Terms of Endearment just because it was popular. Nice eats, nice place, nice folks- what more could I possibly want? Besides, the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job. So if you believed with sufficient industry that we had had a good time with Brian and Louise in theory, then we would have had a good time in fact. The only hint that in truth you’d found our afternoon laborous was that your enthusiasm was excessive. ↗

— Lionel Shriver

#life

Live is meaningful only if you gave it a meaning. ↗

— T. Harv Eker

#meaning-of-life #life

Relativism poses as humble by saying: “We are not smart enough to know what the truth is—or if there is any universal truth.” It sounds humble. But look carefully at what is happening. It’s like a servant saying: I am not smart enough to know which person here is my master—or if I even have a master. The result is that I don’t have a master and I can be my own master. That is in reality what happens to relativists: In claiming to be too lowly to know the truth, they exalt themselves as supreme arbiter of what they can think and do. This is not humility. This is the essence of pride. ↗

— John Piper

#pride #relativism #life

If life didn’t give you at least one person not wanting you to succeed then half of us would lose are motivation to climb that cliff in order to prove them wrong. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#succeed #life