#wall

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: 'It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity. ↗

— James Keller

#ago #bear #carved #cell #condemned

I think people need housing. And there's empty buildings, I think people should live in there. If you want to call them squatters, trespassers, hey, I call Wall Street thieves! ↗

— Al Lewis

#call #empty #hey #housing #i

To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind. ↗

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

#dominating #follow #human #human mind #mind

Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique experience, but there's a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor. ↗

— Chbosky

#coming-of-age #life #the-perks-of-being-a-wallflower #age

The state of Israel must, from time to time, prove clearly that it is strong, and able and willing to use force, in a devastating and highly effective way. If it does not prove this, it will be swallowed up, and perhaps wiped off the face of the earth. ↗

— Moshe Sharett

#clearly #devastating #does #earth #effective

In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, anniversary of his birth, Michel de Montaigne, lon weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned Virgins [Muses], where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will completethis abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure. ↗

— Michel de Montaigne

#age

Jess couldn't stop spitting out words, because they were words like blades to hurt, and if she swallowed them, she'd be scraped hollow. ↗

— Helen Oyeyemi

#swallowing #words #anger

It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#art

Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else. ↗

— Albert Camus

#art #creating #flowers #marcel-proust #wallpaper

Infinite Jest not only says that being human is hard work; it makes us work hard. It not only suggests we put ourselves in service to something larger than ourselves; it is one of those larger somethings. That's its rhetorical genius, and is how Wallace gets his self-help “to fly at such a high altitude”: Like AA, it is theory and praxis in a single stroke. Or: It is what it says, which may be the purest form of art. ↗

— Garth Risk Hallberg

#infinite-jest #art