#lt

If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind. ↗

— Émilie Du Châtelet

#engineering #math #passonate-minds #rights #science

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. ↗

— Ezra Pound

#despair #difficulty #fear #optimism #poetry

I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up," he said. "And it is my privilege and my responsibility to ride all the way up with you," I said. ↗

— John Green

#hazel-grace #the-fault-in-our-stars #grace

That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms. ↗

— Khaled Hosseini

#cring #fables #greed #poverty #sorrow

What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#women

Girl scouts didn't teach me what to do with emotionally unstable drunk boys. ↗

— Stephanie Perkins

#teaching

One-third of our people were dangerously ill, getting worse hourly, and we felt sure of meeting the same fate, with death as our only prospect, which in such a country was much worse yet. ↗

— Alvar N. C. de Vaca

#dangerously #death #fate #felt #getting

We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease. ↗

— N.K. Jemisin

#gods #hubris #humanity #cruelty

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, we would all be vegetarian. ↗

— Paul McCartney

#animal-rights #animal-welfare #vegan #vegetarian #cruelty

It isn't God who's evil-it's us.......Everyone wants to know where evil comes from and why the world is riddle with it. Why doesn't anyone ask where goodness comes from? Human beings have a tremendous capacity for cruelty. Why is there any goodness at all? Why are people like Grace and Richard so kind? Because there's a God, and he hasn't allowed the earth to be entirely corrupted. There are sticky like leaves, if you look for them. And when you recognize them, you can feel his presence. ↗

— Sylvain Reynard

#julia #cruelty