#ss

The whole thing is quite hopeless, so it's no good worrying about tomorrow. It probably won't come. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#hopelessness #worry #despair

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#paris

Zaphod marched quickly down the passageway, nervous as hell, but trying to hide it by striding purposefully. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#self-assurance #self-confidence #self-confidence

Pussy punch: when a twat tap just isn't enough ↗

— Tara Sivec

#seduction

Some people are born with a fire inside them. The will to succeed. It isn’t a learned behavior. It’s just some unknown biological factor that makes them try harder. ↗

— J.A. Konrath

#quotable #biology

[Saying] No to racial injustice means a call to look our own bigotry straight in the eye, and No to world hunger calls upon us to recognize our own lack of poverty. No to war requires us to come to terms with our own violence and aggression, and no to oppression and torture forces us to deal directly with our own insensitivities. And so all our No's become challenges to purify our own hearts. In this sense, confrontation always includes self-confrontation. (p. 123-124) ↗

— Henri J. M. Nouwen Donald P. McNeill Douglas A. Morrison

#confrontation #poverty #racism #self-confrontation #war

It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain. ↗

— Pat Barker

#pain #awareness

The lost glove is happy. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#loss #melancholy #melancholy

If they were going to be like that, then I just wished they hadn't actually been German. It was too easy. Too obvious. It was like coming across an Irishman who actually was stupid, a mother-in-law who actually was fat, or an American businessman who actually did have a middle initial and smoked a cigar. You feel as if you are unwillingly performing in a music-hall sketch and wishing you could rewrite the script. If Helmut and Kurt had been Brazilian or Chinese or Latvian or anything else at all, they could then have behaved in exactly the same way and it would have been surprising and intriguing and, more to the point from my perspective, much easier to write about. Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes. I wondered what to do about it, decided that they could simply be Latvians if I wanted, and then at last drifted off peacefully to worrying about my boots. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#german #humour #stereotypes #business

The bird dares to break the shell, then the shell breaks open and the bird can fly openly. This is the simplest principle of success. You dream, you dare and and you fly. ↗

— Israelmore Ayivor

#birds #break #can-do-spirit #dare #dare-to-win