#provoking

God has made us so that we must be mutually dependent. We may ignore our own dependence, or refuse to acknowledge that others depend upon us in more respects than the payment of weekly wages; but the thing must be, nevertheless. Neither you nor any other master can help yourselves. The most proudly independent man depends on those around him for their insensible influence on his character - his life. ↗

— Elizabeth Gaskell

#thought-provoking #life

Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#feel #i #i feel #once #provoking

‎"Tell me, sir, what is a butterfly?" "It's what you are meant to become. It flies with beautiful wings and joins the earth to heaven. It drinks only nectar from the flowers and carries the seeds of love from one flower to another. Without butterflies, the world would soon have few flowers. ↗

— Trina Paulus

#thought-provoking #beauty

...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160) ↗

— Katherine Paterson

#beauty

To give and receive love, you have to be in touch with pain, you have to be capable of provoking it and feeling it. ↗

— Jeanne Moreau

#feeling #give #love #pain #provoking

What she'd done was give him a glimpse of something that scared the bejesus out of him, something never meant for men like him that could start a hunger that would eat away what little was left inside him that didn't need to be shoved into the dark place. ↗

— Ellen O'Connell

#beauty

It's just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#thought-provoking #life

Before you bombed my boy Osama I always thought an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops…I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop. ↗

— Chris Cleave

#life

We live by our labors from one harvest to the next, there is no certain telling whether we shall be able to feed ourselves and our children, and if bad times are prolonged we know we must see the weak surrender their lives and this fact, too, is within our experience. In our lives there is no margin for misfortune. ↗

— Kamala Markandaya

#experience

As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have. ↗

— Yann Martel

#love