#ata

I felt old. Again. It had been happening a lot lately. I did not live the life of an old lady, but I could hear it beckoning to me, like a mermaid on a rock." — Michelle Tea, "Paris: A Lie" from the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache ↗

— Clint Catalyst and MIchelle Tea

#anthology #clint-catalyst #editors #experimental #first-person-narrative

Grief, regret, pain, and of course anger. Another loss. And when you compare this one loss to the hundreds and maybe thousands that occur people stop thinking they matter. It does matter though. Every loss matters. ↗

— Natalie Valdes

#loss #love #natalie-valdes #pain #promise

This much is true: When you are about to effect the lives of hundreds of people, Satan will do everything he can to prevent it from happening. Often pride and anger are his best assassins. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#charity #life-missions #life-purpose #organizations #satan

Thou art my father, thou my author, thou my being gav'st me; whom should I obey but thee, whom follow? ↗

— John Milton

#satan #art

We have seen segments of our Government, in their attitudes and action, adopt tactics unworthy of a democracy, and occasionally reminiscent of totalitarian regimes. We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what witnesses characterized as "vacuum cleaners", sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens. The tendency of intelligence activities to expand beyond their initial scope is a theme which runs through every aspect of our investigative findings. Intelligence collection programs naturally generate ever-increasing demands for new data. And once intelligence has been collected, there are strong pressures to use it against the target. ↗

— Church Committee

#data #national-security #predictions #prescience #secrecy

I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn't have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful. ↗

— Harry Crews

#sears-catalogue #beauty

But there were worse things than disappointment, and I'd lived through several of them already. ↗

— R.J. Anderson

#disappointment #relatable #courage

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood? ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#death #life #pessimism #death

A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned? ↗

— Alan Moore

#life #death

In some counties, there is an actual named crime of ritual abuse and there too, there have been convictions. ↗

— Laurie Matthew

#child-abuse #childabuse #childhood-abuse #crime #death