#ado

Was it the act of giving birth that made you a mother? Did you lose that label when you relinquished your child? If people were measured by their deeds, on the one hand, I had a woman who had chosen to give me up; on the other, I had a woman who'd sat up with me at night when I was sick as a child, who'd cried with me over boyfriends, who'd clapped fiercely at my law school graduation. Which acts made you more of a mother? Both, I realized. Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#children #motherhood #parenting #life

Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man? ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#organized-religion #paradox #religion #religion

None of you appreciate me. Why is it so hard to believe that I could make a real contribution in these dark times? My cigarettes and I are going outside. At least they show me respect. ↗

— Richelle Mead

#vampire-academy #respect

But then she often felt like this lately. The world seemed full of transparent frauds that only she could see through. She was forever shouting from the hustings of honesty, though if any honesty were directed at her she ran from it horrified. And she knew it, laughed at herself for it, wretchedly. She was all to pieces. ↗

— Jude Morgan

#romantic

Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#paradox #advice

...it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths that distinguishes us from the mere animals and gives us Reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God... ↗

— Gottfried Leibniz

#science

For the first time, she recognized the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her early teens, and later as a young woman. The recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded. ↗

— Kate Chopin

#teen

Every time your heart is broken, a doorway cracks open to a world full of new beginnings, new opportunities. ↗

— Patti Roberts

#opportunity #paradox

Remember the pain?' thought Artemis. I hate myself. I really do. ↗

— Eoin Colfer

#paradox

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first. ↗

— Malcolm Gladwell

#sociology #paradox