#graph

There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing at all. ↗

— Benjamin Moser

#punishment #war #biography

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#expectations #open-mindedness #preconceptions #reading #biography

Chasing angels or fleeing demons, go to the mountains. ↗

— Jeffrey Rasley

#expeditions #himalayas #memoir #mountaineering #mountains

You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture. You've got to become them." (Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History) ↗

— David McCullough

#history #biography

I turned to books for comfort. (Former First Lady, Laura Bush) ↗

— Laura Bush

#political #politically-correct #telling #biography

All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. ↗

— Anne Brontë

#thought #truth #writing #biography

بلدٌ يقضي فيه المرء أوقاته متطلّعاً إلى السماء متأمّلا القمم الشاهقة ، هو بلدٌ لي ↗

— Amélie Nothomb

#mountains #novel #biography

But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver. No, said Tolkien, they are not. ...just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil. You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand. ↗

— Humphrey Carpenter

#christ #myth #myths #splintered-light #sub-creator

And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprintit’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania ↗

— Philip Roth

#memory-loss #biography

Every woman is wired differently. Some women's nerves branch more in the vagina; other women's nerves branch more in the clitoris. Some branch a great deal in the perineum, or at the mouth of the cervix. That accounts for some of the differences in female sexual response. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#vagina #biography