#lit

I cleaned the shit off my pink high-tops and drove home, stopping for an espresso at the coffeehouse across from the college. Men and women were hunched over copies of Jean Paul Sartre and writing in their journals. Most wore the thin-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses favored by intellectuals. Their clothes were faded to a precisely fashionable degree; you can buy them that way from catalogs now, new clothes processed to look old. The intellectuals looked at me in my overalls the way such people inevitably look at farmers. I dumped a lot of sugar in my espresso and sipped it delicately at a corner table near the door. I looked at them the way farmers look at intellectuals. ↗

— Mary Rose O'Reilley

#coffee #farmers #fashion #intellectuals #spirituality

Could the straggling thoughts of individuals be collected, they would frequently form materials for wise and able men to improve into useful matter. ↗

— Thomas Paine

#men

...sentences of the court on moral issues are always passed in absentia. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#judgment #morality #men

ATHENA: There are two sides to this dispute. I've heard only one half the argument. (...) So you two parties, summon your witnesses, set out your proofs, with sworn evidence to back your stories. Once I've picked the finest men in Athens, I'll return. They'll rule fairly in this case, bound by a sworn oath to act with justice. ↗

— Aeschylus

#fairness #impartiality #judgment #justice #men

An obstacle which would frighten discreet men is nothing to determined women. They dare what men avoid, and sometimes they achieve an unusual success. ↗

— Ōgai Mori

#japanese #japanese-literature #women #men

If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#government #politics #men

He knew that if Michelle entered into the walls of the Vatican, she’d corrupt every single clergyman within, causing them to forsake their vows in trade for a few moments with her. With one glance men would happily follow her to the bowels of hell and swim across the lake of fire to get to her. ↗

— Travis Luedke

#michelle #seduction #sensuality #men

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. . . in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#reading #experience

Nothing but sunrise and sunsetting Men fighting the things that are- Birthgiving and bloodletting And a drunk god snoring afar. ↗

— Dan Levin

#military-quote #men

Who says great literatue has to be written by men? Who says great literature has to be about scary, creepy stuff like adulterers being punished and black slaves breaking loose and giant whales eating people? Why can't literature just be stories about women? Refined, respectable women have just as much to say as ignorant black slaves or bloodthirsty Indians or mad white whaling captains. Why do we have to pretend those people's lives matter more than our own? ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#men