Whose Quotes (page 20)
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Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.
Neil Gaiman
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can...
Audre Lorde
The New ColossusNot like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she with silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses...
Emma Lazarus
I SEE thee better in the dark,
I do not need a light.
The love of thee a prism be
Excelling violet.
I see thee better for the years
That hunch themselves between,
The miner’s lamp sufficient be
To nullify the mine.
And in the grave I see thee best—
Its little panels be
A-glow, all ruddy with the light
I held so high for thee!
What need of day to those whose dark
Hath so surpassing sun,
It seem it be continually
At the meridian?
Emily Dickinson
Feelings come and feelings go, And feelings are deceiving; My warrant is the Word of God--Naught else is worth believing. Though all my heart should feel condemned. For want of some sweet token, There is One greater than my heart. Whose Word cannot be broken. I'll trust in God's unchanging Word. Till soul and body sever, For, though all things shall pass away, HIS WORD SHALL STAND FOREVER!
Martin Luther
Solitude. There is a charm in Solitude that cheers. A feeling that the world knows nothing of. A green delight the wounded mind endears. After the hustling world is broken off. Whose whole delight was crime at good to scoff. Green solitude his prison pleasure yields. The bitch fox heeds him not -- birds seem to laugh. He lives the Crusoe of his lonely fields. Which dark green oaks his noontide leisure shields
John Clare
To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place. In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is...
Dag Hammarskjold
We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth.
Christopher Hitchens
I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me? afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent...
Guy de Maupassant
Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of...
Marion Zimmer Bradley
