#tory

Shelves full of books are all around me. Opening the different volumes I take a look, and find the pages covered with writings in unknown scripts — tadpole traces, bird feet markings, twisted branches. And in my dream I am able to read them all, to make sense of everything despite its difficulty. ↗

— Jonathan D. Spence

#dream #history #reading #dreams

And that's the bottom layer in old boxes: melancholy, an indefinable sense of loss. You dig around and it comes swirling up to the top ↗

— John Ajvide Lindqvist

#dreams

Only now, in rhythmic waves, was she struck by her stupidity, her blindness, her estheronautiness, and, above all, her longing, the insult of the power of her longing, and she knew very well that is was these shortcomings that had made her so eager to interweave in his story the threads of her secret dreams of candor and of painful, purifying honesty; of a generous togetherness in which everything was possible. For a moment, with all that had been spun and stabbed and defiled within her, her face took on the expression of a frightened, abandoned girl who lunges out to bite, who lives unimaginably close to the skin’s surface, ready to be drawn out like a final plan of retreat. ↗

— David Grossman

#honesty #longing #story #dreams

My spirit mirrors the radiance of a clear, blue sky. With closed eyes I lift my face and smile, warmed from the core and from above. All hopes and dreams compete with this endless expanse of heaven, desiring the clock of eternity. I reach with my hands―frenziedly achieving―attempting to learn and do all. Yet I understand the humble truth; a drop of rain shall amount to my contribution among all the droplets in the vast ocean of human history. It is a pure and precious tear that seeps from my efforts....my existence. Taste how sweet! It is all that I have, given willingly. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#achieving #contributions #desires #goals #history-of-mankind

History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning. ↗

— Carter G. Woodson

#history #power #privilege #education

As you can see, there are quite a number of things taught in school that one has to unlearn or at least correct. ↗

— Ambeth R. Ocampo

#learning #philippine-history #philippines #rizal #school

I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#fairy-tales #imagination #nursery-rhymes #storytelling #education

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women. ↗

— Henry Adams

#women #education

Considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From the start, many people recognized that United States of America was unsatisfactory. For one thing, it allowed of no convenient adjectival form. A citizen would have to be either a United Statesian or some other such clumsy locution, or an American, thereby arrogating to ourselves a title that belonged equally to the inhabitants of some three dozen other nations on two continents. Several alternatives to America were actively considered -Columbia, Appalachia, Alleghania, Freedonia or Fredonia (whose denizens would be called Freeds or Fredes)- but none mustered sufficient support to displace the existing name. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#humor #language #equality

...the holy men sat in an atmosphere reeking of antiquity, so thick with the dust of ages that you can't see through it --nor can they. ↗

— Gertrude Bell

#wisdom #age