#provoking

Futures can and do change, something as simple as you're supposed to turn right down a street one day... In your bones u know it, and yet for reasons no one understands, you decide to debunk fate and go left. Now instead of meeting your spouse of your dreams and having a house full of kids, you get flattened by an ice-cream truck and spend the next 5 years in physical therapy recovering from the injuries; or worse you die from it. And all cause you exercised free will and turned the opposite way on a whim. ↗

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

#make-you-think #thought-provoking #change

If these self-anointed leaders did not keep the people aroused with calls to preserve the Revolution, or to defend it from one imaginary foe after another, then the people might shake themselves awake from the trance they were in and begin to question the very men who had drenched their streets in blood and make France pariah among the civilized nations of the world. ↗

— Robert Masello

#men

I'm not interested in provoking people, but only in trying to be consoling. ↗

— Martin Kippenberger

#i #interested #not interested #only #people

When something terrible happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved anger, and unexplored fears begins to play itself out in ways you least expect. You've been going along from one day to the next, not realizing that all those disparate words and gestures were adding up to something, a conclusion, you didn't anticipate. And later, when you begin to retrace your steps you see that you will need to reach back further than you could have imagined, beyond words and thoughts and even dreams, perhaps to make sense of what happened. ↗

— Christina Baker Kline

#anger

You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#thought-provoking #intelligence

Lead us not into temptation' often means, among other things, 'Deny me those gratifying invitations, those highly interesting contacts, that participation in the brilliant movements of our age, which I so often, at such risk, desire.' Reflections on the Psalms, ch 7 ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#age

Usually if nobody hates a piece, nobody loves it, either; and a magazine which sets itself the goal of provoking thought is not doing its job if everybody agrees with what it does. ↗

— Stanley Schmidt

#doing #either #everybody #goal #hates

Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that. ↗

— Maggie Nelson

#loneliness #sadness #thought-provoking #beauty

The party in Alobar’s head, which agitation and anxiety were throwing, now was crashed by a notion: existence can be rearranged. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#life #thought-provoking #inspirational

But was that not the task you set me? To defend the helpless against the strong?" "Indeed it was Master Weed. But who is to say who is helpless, and who is strong?" .........."If you seek the power to alter fate, you must also bear responsibility for the consequences. For you cannot change the fate of only one being; all fates are intertwined." "I performed the task," I protest. "I did what you bid me do." "You defended the weak from the strong." Larkspur speaks as if from far away. "But who will defend these poor weak infants against you!? ↗

— Maryrose Wood

#change