#thy

The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. ↗

— David Mitchell

#humor #humor

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#novel #reading #imagination

One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding. ↗

— Tim Kreider

#judgment #understanding #love

Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#holy #love #worthy #love

You don’t know?” he whispered harshly. “You truly don’t know that you mean everything to me?” Hardly daring to believe her ears, Mia pushed at his chest to put a little distance between them so she could look up at his face. “I do?” “Of course, you do.” His gaze burned into her with an intensity she had never seen before. “How could you doubt it?” “Are . . . are you saying you love me?” she asked tremulously, afraid to even voice such a possibility. What if he said no? What if she’d misunderstood him, and he would now laugh at her silliness? Her chest tightened in anxious anticipation. “Mia, I love you more than life itself,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “If anything happened to you . . . If you were gone, I would not want to go on living. Do you understand me? ↗

— Anna Zaires

#life

Two did not become one, but rather two came together—each one strong, healthy, and resilient, making the whole steadfast and true. They didn’t lose themselves in each other, but found themselves in each other instead. ↗

— Jennifer Lane

#healthy #interdependence #love #romance #love

Don't ever say that, Fennrys," she said. "I don't ever want to hear you say that you don't deserve or you aren't worthy. You do. You are. ↗

— Lesley Livingston

#deserve #fenn #love #mason #starling

When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention. ↗

— Nicholas D. Kristof

#empathy #women #women-s-rights #oppression

[we are] going to continue to fight communism. Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat. ↗

— Harry S. Truman

#mccarthyism #communism

You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains. ↗

— Imre Kertész

#deception #government #radicalism #tolerance #truth