History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
- Seamus Heaney
Showing posts with label quotes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quotes. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 01, 2021
Friday, May 28, 2021
Today's Quote
It actually doesn't take much to be considered a difficult woman -
that's why there are so many of us.
- Jane Goodall
Tuesday, May 04, 2021
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Today's Quote
Socialism does not aim at robbing the rich, but at preventing the rich from continuing to rob the poor.
- Tom Mann, Labor organizer and activist
Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Today's Quote
The fullness of racism’s cruel bounty is not found in the bodies of the dead alone, but also in the spirits of the living. Most of us will not be killed by police officers. White supremacy will not kill us so directly, so flagrantly. Instead it dogs our steps, wages niggling wars on our peace itself. Its power is in the daily theft of our joy, our dignity, our sanity. It is in the way we always have to weigh and calculate, how we can never assume good intentions and honest mistakes. Because it is always there, in swirling eddies around our ankles, waiting to drag us under.
“Slow Poison,” Ezekiel Kweku
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
A Quote
As we wait for updated news from Boulder:
It is no measure of sanity to be well-adjusted to an insane society.
-- John Robbins
Saturday, March 13, 2021
Quote-ish
I do hateful things for which people love me,
and loving things for which they hate me.
I am widely admired for my utter detestability.
Wednesday, February 17, 2021
Today's Quote
 |
| Archibald McLeish |
It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the answers for everybody else.
Tuesday, December 29, 2020
Today's Quote
To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
Barry Holstun Lopez (January 6, 1945 – December 25, 2020) was an American author, essayist, nature writer, and fiction writer whose work is known for its humanitarian and environmental concerns. In a career spanning over 50 years, he visited over 80 countries, and wrote extensively about distant and exotic landscapes including the Arctic wilderness, exploring the relationship between human cultures and nature. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams (1986) and his Of Wolves and Men (1978) was a National Book Award finalist. He was a contributor to magazines including Harper's Magazine, National Geographic, and The Paris Review.
National Book Award winner Barry Lopez was famous for chronicling his travels to remote places and the landscapes he found there. But his writings weren't simply accounts of his journeys — they were reminders of how precious life on earth is, and of our responsibility to care for it. He died on Christmas Day following a years-long battle with prostate cancer, his wife confirmed to NPR. He was 75.
Lopez spent more than 30 years writing his last book, Horizon, and you don't spend that much time on a project without going through periods of self doubt.
When I met him at his home last year, he told me when he was feeling defeated by the work, he'd walk along the nearby McKenzie River.
"Every time I did there was a beaver stick in the water at my feet. And they're of course, they're workers. So I imagined the beaver were saying 'What the hell's wrong with you? You get back in there and do your work.'"
Up in his studio, he had a collection of the sticks, and he showed me how they bore the marks of little teeth. It was a lesson for Lopez. "Everyday I saw the signs of: don't lose faith in yourself," he told me.
This was the world of Barry Lopez — a world where a beaver could teach you the most valuable lessons.
Lopez was born in New York, but his father moved the family to California when he was a child. He would eventually settle in Oregon, where he gained notice for his writing about the natural world. He won the 1986 National Book Award for his nonfiction work Arctic Dreams.
At the time, he told NPR how he approached the seemingly empty Arctic environment.
"I made myself pay attention to places where I thought nothing was going on," he said then. "And then after a while, the landscape materialized in a in a fuller way. Its expression was deeper and broader than I had first imagined that at first glance."
In Lopez's books, a cloudy sky contains "grays of pigeon feathers, of slate and pearls." Packs of hammerhead sharks in the Galapagos move "like swans milling on a city park pond"
Composer John Luther Adams was friend and collaborator of Lopez for nearly four decades He says Lopez's writing serves as a wake-up call.
"He surveys the beauty of the world and at the same time, the cruelty and violence that we humans inflict on the Earth and on one another, and he does it with deep compassion," Adams says
Lopez experienced that cruelty firsthand: As a child he was sexually abused by a family friend. He first wrote about it in 2013, and he later told NPR the experience made him feel afraid and shameful around other people. The animals he encountered in the California wilderness offered something different.
"They didn't say 'oh we know what you went through,'" he said. "I felt accepted by the animate world."
Lopez would spend his life writing about that world — in particular the damage done to it by climate change.
That hit home for Lopez this past September. Much of his property was burned in wildfires that tore through Oregon, partly due to abnormally dry conditions. His wife Debra Gwartney says he lost an archive that stored most of his books, awards, notes and correspondence from the past 50 years, as well as much of the forest around the home.
"He talked a lot about climate change and how it's so easy to think that it's going to happen to other people and not to you," she says. "But it happened to us, it happened to him personally. The fire was a blow he never could recover from."
When I spoke to Lopez last year, he said he always sought to find grace in the middle of devastation.
"It's so difficult to be a human being. There are so many reasons to give up. To retreat into cynicism or despair. I hate to see that and I want to do something that makes people feel safe and loved and capable."
In his last days, Lopez's family brought objects from his home to him in hospice. Among the items: the beaver sticks from his studio.
January 6, 1945 – December 25, 2020
National Book Award winner Barry Lopez was famous for chronicling his travels to remote places and the landscapes he found there. But his writings weren't simply accounts of his journeys — they were reminders of how precious life on earth is, and of our responsibility to care for it. He died on Christmas Day following a years-long battle with prostate cancer, his wife confirmed to NPR. He was 75.
Lopez spent more than 30 years writing his last book, Horizon, and you don't spend that much time on a project without going through periods of self doubt.
When I met him at his home last year, he told me when he was feeling defeated by the work, he'd walk along the nearby McKenzie River.
"Every time I did there was a beaver stick in the water at my feet. And they're of course, they're workers. So I imagined the beaver were saying 'What the hell's wrong with you? You get back in there and do your work.'"
Up in his studio, he had a collection of the sticks, and he showed me how they bore the marks of little teeth. It was a lesson for Lopez. "Everyday I saw the signs of: don't lose faith in yourself," he told me.
This was the world of Barry Lopez — a world where a beaver could teach you the most valuable lessons.
Lopez was born in New York, but his father moved the family to California when he was a child. He would eventually settle in Oregon, where he gained notice for his writing about the natural world. He won the 1986 National Book Award for his nonfiction work Arctic Dreams.
At the time, he told NPR how he approached the seemingly empty Arctic environment.
"I made myself pay attention to places where I thought nothing was going on," he said then. "And then after a while, the landscape materialized in a in a fuller way. Its expression was deeper and broader than I had first imagined that at first glance."
In Lopez's books, a cloudy sky contains "grays of pigeon feathers, of slate and pearls." Packs of hammerhead sharks in the Galapagos move "like swans milling on a city park pond"
Composer John Luther Adams was friend and collaborator of Lopez for nearly four decades He says Lopez's writing serves as a wake-up call.
"He surveys the beauty of the world and at the same time, the cruelty and violence that we humans inflict on the Earth and on one another, and he does it with deep compassion," Adams says
Lopez experienced that cruelty firsthand: As a child he was sexually abused by a family friend. He first wrote about it in 2013, and he later told NPR the experience made him feel afraid and shameful around other people. The animals he encountered in the California wilderness offered something different.
"They didn't say 'oh we know what you went through,'" he said. "I felt accepted by the animate world."
Lopez would spend his life writing about that world — in particular the damage done to it by climate change.
That hit home for Lopez this past September. Much of his property was burned in wildfires that tore through Oregon, partly due to abnormally dry conditions. His wife Debra Gwartney says he lost an archive that stored most of his books, awards, notes and correspondence from the past 50 years, as well as much of the forest around the home.
"He talked a lot about climate change and how it's so easy to think that it's going to happen to other people and not to you," she says. "But it happened to us, it happened to him personally. The fire was a blow he never could recover from."
When I spoke to Lopez last year, he said he always sought to find grace in the middle of devastation.
"It's so difficult to be a human being. There are so many reasons to give up. To retreat into cynicism or despair. I hate to see that and I want to do something that makes people feel safe and loved and capable."
In his last days, Lopez's family brought objects from his home to him in hospice. Among the items: the beaver sticks from his studio.
Saturday, December 05, 2020
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Friday, October 30, 2020
Today's Quote
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Friday, October 16, 2020
Today's Quote
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.
Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakes.
-- Carl Jung
Saturday, September 19, 2020
Today's Quote
“I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination."
- Lindsey Graham
“I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination." pic.twitter.com/quD1K5j9pz
— Vanita Gupta (@vanitaguptaCR) September 19, 2020
Sunday, September 13, 2020
Today's Quote
The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he.
Karl Kraus (1874–1936), Austrian journalist, critic, playwright, and poet
Thursday, July 30, 2020
Thursday, July 23, 2020
Today's Beau
Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column
"Nobody's this wrong by accident."
The Cult45 strategy seems to be to provoke the violence they say they're trying to quell.
Classic.
Monday, July 20, 2020
Today's Turnaround
The cynical manipulator will always restate the obvious in order to make himself look like the victim.
Wallace says the feds are the tyrants by trying to stop him from being tyrannical.
One of the more popular recent versions of this is to say that Al Sharpton is the real racist because he's pointing out how racist some white people are.
"The cops are the ones who should be arrested. They stormed into that bank, and they stole my gun and all the money I had in this little bag - they even took my ski mask."
Wallace says the feds are the tyrants by trying to stop him from being tyrannical.
One of the more popular recent versions of this is to say that Al Sharpton is the real racist because he's pointing out how racist some white people are.
"The cops are the ones who should be arrested. They stormed into that bank, and they stole my gun and all the money I had in this little bag - they even took my ski mask."
Sunday, April 19, 2020
A Quote
Ali ibn Abi Talib was an in-law of the "prophet" Muhammad. Which means to me, he was a huckstering preacher - a guy who knew he could hold on to power only as long as he could keep the sheep in line, so...
First, you're not a fuckin' flower.
Second, even if you are a fuckin' flower, you still have a brain and you're expected to use it for something other than storing recipes and birthdays and the firing order of a Dodge Hemi.
Third - YOU'RE NOT A FUCKIN' FLOWER.
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