#selves

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass. ↗

— Eudora Welty

#books #coming #disappointing #find #grass

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive. ↗

— Jessamyn West

#alive #barriers #between #communication #elders

Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves. ↗

— Rebecca West

#believe #each #even #everyone #less

When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad. ↗

— E. B. White

#beyond #bury #child #deep #happy

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. ↗

— Edmund White

#biography #forms #great #judgment #little

Though all afflictions are evils in themselves, yet they are good for us, because they discover to us our disease and tend to our cure. ↗

— David Viscott

#because #cure #discover #disease #evils

Later we learned that it was one of our own men hanging on the wire. Nobody could do anything for him; two men had already tried to save him, only to be shot themselves. ↗

— Ernst Toller

#anything #could #had #hanging #him

A man like Wilde was not free to live out of the closet as a homosexual, and women in general were not able to be truly themselves; there was no place for a woman's voice to be heard or for her to express her sexuality. ↗

— Marisa Tomei

#closet #express #free #general #heard

When I recall my own path of life I cannot but speak of the violence, hatred and lies. A lesson drawn from such experiences, however, was that we can effectively oppose violence only if we ourselves do not resort to it. ↗

— Lech Walesa

#drawn #effectively #experiences #hatred #however

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it's almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves. ↗

— Alice Walker

#deeply #i #i love #incredibly #insanely