#kin

You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, 'There, you sons of bitches, don't lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.'" "But any country is still in the making. Always. That's just history, people have to see that. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#diversity #kingsolver #lacuna #diversity

I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane. ↗

— John Green

#looking-for-alaska #rain

Evil is relative…You can’t hang a sign on it. You can’t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger. ↗

— Glen Cook

#morality #cooking

Lord, you're Irish," said Will. "Can you make things that don't have potatoes in them? We had an Irish cook once when I was a boy. Potato pie, potato custard, potatoes with potato sauce... ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#clockwork-prince #will #cooking

I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. ↗

— Mark Twain

#cooking

Near the window, Finnikin stood with both hands against the wall, his head bent over her. As always, the intimacy between them made Froi ache. "I promise you," Finnikin said. "I've already shouted at her and used a very, very reprimanding tone." "I was quivering," the Queen said, stepping out from behind Finnikin. ↗

— Melina Marchetta

#froi #isaboe #intimacy

Keep your heart clear And transparent, And you will Never be bound. A single disturbed thought Creates ten thousand distractions. ↗

— Ryokan

#honesty #meditation #thinking #thought #honesty

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#dressing #innovation #introspection #melancholy #philosophical

The lucidity, the clarity of light that afternoon was sufficient to itself; perfect transparency must be impenetrable, these vertical bars of brass-coloured distillation of light coming down from sulphur-yellow interstices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nicotine-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. A cold day of late October, when the withered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles. There were crisp husks of beechmast and cast acorn cups underfoot in the russet slime of the dead bracken where the rains of the equinox had so soaked the earth that the cold oozed up through the soles of the shoes, lancinating cold of the approaching winter that grips hold of your belly and squeezed it tight. Now the stark elders have an anorexic look; there is not much in the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being; the year, in turning, turns in on itself. Introspective weather, a sickroom hush. ↗

— Angela Carter

#introspection

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets. ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#naked-lunch #thinking #william-burroughs #introspection