#sign

As much as I don't care about those things, I think it's human nature to not want to feel totally insignificant. ↗

— Megan McCafferty

#humans #jessica-darling #significance #nature

The sign said don’t do it, so naturally I did it. Signs are always saying stuff in a silent way.
 Writing is a way to say something in a silent way. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#silent #writing #nature

struck by the pain of the ice and the rage of the water below that was forced to make room for the huge piece of frozen time, the glacier, trapped in a solid state for centuries, melting into the ocean and becoming one with its future. She feels small and insignificant in the face of such a display of nature. ↗

— Garth Stein

#nature-s-grandeur #time #nature

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#decisions #ideas #life #significance #thinking

While railing against the manufactured prerequisites of womanhood or manhood, we need to avoid manufacturing our own prerequisites. The non-operative journey and the objection to it illustrate just one area in which we need to open our thinking to other journeys while expecting that others respect our own. - Mercedes Allen ↗

— Kate Bornstein

#gender-reassignment-surgery #grs #transgender #transition #respect

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox... ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#cycles #despair #emotion #fear #free-will

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#insignificance #sports

I’ll name my town “Unwelcome,” and the sign will say, “Welcome to Unwelcome.”
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#sign #town #unwelcome #welcome #gratitude

Gratitude for the seemingly insignificant—a seed—this plants the giant miracle. ↗

— Ann Voskamp

#gratitude #insignificant #miracle #plant #seed

I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#anonymity #born-again #clean-slate #extinction #family