Tag: quotes

At Osu Castle on Saturday, it was especially important to me, as indeed it was on my first visit there 41 years ago, that I should acknowledge the most painful chapter of Ghana’s relations with the nations of Europe, including the United Kingdom.

The appalling atrocity of the slave trade, and the unimaginable suffering it caused, left an indelible stain on the history of our world.

Prince Charles makes a rare statement recognising the British Empire’s role in the Slave Trade  (via duchessofostergotlands)

i-wrotethisforme:

You need someone who wants to be there when it’s messy and when it’s hard, not just when it’s fun and when it’s convenient. And you need someone who chooses you when it might not be the easiest choice. And you need someone who would rather do nothing with you than anything in the world with someone else.

Theory makes you desire mastery: you hope that theoretical reading will give you the concepts to organize and understand the phenomena that concern you. But theory makes mastery impossible, not only because there is always more to know, but, more specifically and more painfully, because theory is itself the questioning of presumed results and the assumptions on which they are based. The nature of theory is to undo, through a contesting of premisses and postulates, what you thought you knew, so the effects of theory are not predictable. You have not become master, but neither are you where you were before. You reflect on your reading in new ways. You have different questions to ask and a better sense of the implications of the questions you put to works you read.

Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
(via ecrituria)

The disabled athlete pushed boundaries, “overcomes disability,” and is often used as inspiration porn for the abled. “What’s your excuse?” they superimpose over a picture of an attractive young woman with a single lower leg prosthetic.

Disabled athletes are used (wittingly or not) as symbols of personal responsibility and determination. This fits into broader cultural ideals promoting individualism, and not accommodating disability. This is where I point out that most of the amputee athletes in these inspirational pictures are wearing prosthetic running blades that cost $15-18,000 each.

Athletic Inspiration Porn Is No Excuse to Shame Me for My Disability — Everyday Feminism (via ablackberrywinter)

When something bothered me, I didn’t talk with anyone about it. I thought it over all by myself, came to a conclusion, and took action alone. Not that I really felt lonely. I thought that’s just the way things are. Human beings, in the final analysis, have to survive on their own.

Haruki Murakami (via quotemadness)

You don’t get better on the days when you feel like going. You get better on the days when you don’t want to go, but you go anyway. If you can overcome the negative energy coming from your tired body or unmotivated mind, you will grow and become better. It won’t be the best workout you have, you won’t accomplish as much as what you usually do when you actually feel good, but that doesn’t matter. Growth is a long term game, and the crappy days are more important.

Georges St. Pierre (via quotemadness)

Part of the reason the Kavanaugh news cycle has been such a flashpoint—part of the reason that so many conservatives have fanatically defended his right to have hypothetically committed the crime he’s been accused of, and that so many women have been spending the last two weeks in a haze of resurfaced trauma—is that it illuminates the centrality of sexual assault in the matrix of male power in America. In high schools, in colleges, at law schools, and in the halls of Washington, men perform for one another and ascend to positions of power. Watching it happen is a deadening reminder, for victims of sexual assault and harassment, that, in many cases, you were about as meaningful as a chess piece, one of a long procession of objects in the lifelong game that men play with other men.

Jia Tolentino, “Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, and the Things Men Do for Other Men“
(via newyorker)

You’ve got to invest in the world, you’ve got to read, you’ve got to go to art galleries, you’ve got to find out the names of plants. You’ve got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We’re amazing people.

Vivienne Westwood (via quotemadness)

Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.

Lev Grossman (via quotemadness)