#question

Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds -- justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner. ↗

— Anne Rice

#courage #daring #knowledge #questions #risk

Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33) ↗

— Tim Willocks

#apple #asymmetry #atlantic #autumn #blind-man

You remember having friends who used to lampoon the world so effortlessly, crouching at the verge of every joke and waiting to pounce on it, and you remember how they changed as they grew older and the joy of questioning everything slowly became transformed into the pain of questioning everything, like a star consuming its own core. ↗

— Kevin Brockmeier

#humor #joking #questions #wit #age

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? (Just to give you an idea, Proust's reply was 'To be separated from Mama.') I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impotence. At the highest pitch, the death of a friend or even the fear of the death of a child. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#children #death #fear #friends #idleness

Do animals understand the concept of dreams or do they think they enter another dimension when they get tired? ↗

— Christy Leigh Stewart

#dogs #funny-and-random #question #dreams

It's not a question of who will allow me to do it, it's a question of who will stop me. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#dedication #dreams #question #rand #stop

That's not a real answer.' Says who?' Says me. I mean real fear, like of failure, of death, of regret. Like that. Something that keeps you awake nights, questioning your very existence.' Clowns. ↗

— Sarah Dessen

#death

On every page, confidence fights with self-doubt. Every sentence is an act of faith. Why would anybody want to do it? ↗

— David Morrell

#novelist #purpose #questions #writer #writing

The more you go with the flow of life and surrender the outcome to God, and the less you seek constant clarity, the more you will find that fabulous things start to show up in your life. ↗

— Mandy Hale

#attraction #clarity #faith #go-with-the-flow #god

Competition permits the capitalist to deduct from the price of labour power that which the family earns from its own little garden or field; the workers are compelled to accept any piece wages offered to them, because otherwise they would get nothing at all, and they could not live from the products of their small-scale agriculture alone, and because, on the other hand, it is just this agriculture and landownership which chains them to the spot and prevents them from looking around for other employment. ↗

— Friedrich Engels

#housing #marx #marxist #question #family