#uma

I tried to map the cultural trends leading up to it but as I did they grew, interconnecting and weaving backwards and sideways out to everything. Next to the megalithic institutionalized shredding of people's humanity, marked by tombstone malls and scabby hills, the Styrofoam gullets and flag-waving god-chatterers casting their votes for eternal paternity on the lap rapists - next to all of that, the intimacy between a terrorist and his target was almost a beautiful thing but I still couldn't solve that moment when they did it anyway so I grabbed more paper and widened my field of vision. ↗

— Vanessa Veselka

#humanity #terror #beauty

I thought: this is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves. ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#pain #beauty

[an encounter in space] "Some celestial event. No--no words--no words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful...I had no idea. I had no idea. ↗

— Carl Sagan as Ellie Arroway

#space-and-cosmos #wonder #beauty

Then at once they reached and hovered upon the imminent verge of sleep - but an intruder came, now, that would not "down". It was conscience. They began to feel a vague fear that they had been doing wrong to run away; and next they thought of the stolen meat, and then the real torture came [...] So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing. Then conscience granted a truce, and these curiously inconsistent pirates fell peacefully to sleep. ↗

— Mark Twain

#childhood #conscience #human-nature #humanity #sleep

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#human-nature #life

Self-talk reflects your innermost feelings. ↗

— Asa Don Brown

#counsellor #counselor #humanity #joy #kindness

As for human contact, I'd lost all appetite for it. Mankind has, as you may have noticed, become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other and I'd been taking full advantage of the most recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Rather than meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them all what a busy life I was leading. And presumably people had been enjoying them, because I'd got more than seventy friends on Facebook now, most of them complete strangers. But actual, face-to-face, let's-meet-for-a-coffee-and-catch-up sort of contact? I seemed to have forgotten what that was all about. ↗

— Jonathan Coe

#human-contact #business

Business of all kinds, over the centuries, had atrophied certain sense receptors and areas of the human brain, so that for most of the fellows taking part, the present-day rituals were no more, and even maybe a little less, than hollow mummery. ↗

— Thomas Pynchon

#business

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. ↗

— Mary Shelley

#human #change

I find it odd- the greed of mankind. People only like you for as long as they perceive they can get what they want from you. Or for as long as they perceive you are who they want you to be. But I like people for all of their changing surprises, the thoughts in their heads, the warmth that changes to cold and the cold that changes to warmth... for being human. The rawness of being human delights me. ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#human-nature #humanism #humanity #inspirational #inspirational-attitude