Sow love, reap peace. Sow meditation, reap wisdom.
Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.
. . . but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.
Mirrors are there when we are and yet they never give anything back to us but our own image. Never, never shall we know what they are when they are alone or what is behind them.
A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.
We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.
Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.
One of the concepts I was having trouble illustrating was the concept that administrative systems create narrow categories of gender and force people into them in order to get their basic needs met - what I call "administrative violence. " I had images of forms with gender boxes and ID cards with gender markers, but I also wanted an image that would capture how basic services like shelters are gender segregated.
Our nature is to desperately want to believe and to take what we believe is the quickest path there even against our better judgment.
Any relations in a social order will endure, if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy which qualifies life for immortality.
If you can delude yourself by believing that there is some kind of Santa Claus out there who is going to bail you out in the end, then it will help you get through. Even if you are proven wrong in the end, you would have had a better life than a non-believer.