“For if we are alive—and we are—/we can conjure up/ some spell of change/ to split the seams of darkness,/ to call in a new light/ as we do, again and again and again/ and again,/ together.”
“[S]olidarity work really is about the work of being human. In our humanity, we are meant to love ourselves well, to love one another well, and to love earth and the creatures around us well…Solidarity means choosing not to look away from one another but instead leaning into each other’s stories because they matter…we care for one another because we are kin.”
“…gratitude helps you feel less stressed about the human experience you’re having…it allows you to have power over how you’re feeling…finding the gift doesn’t mean you aren’t rationally aware of the perils and injustices of the inequality baked into our economic systems, but it can help you deal with the adversity you’re facing…gratitude is like a light switch: it allows you to see what was there all along.”
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.
What's a quote you'd want as a poster or tattoo?
What's a quote you'd want as a poster or tattoo?
What's a quote you'd want as a poster or tattoo?
A PSA discussion thread!
I’m curious: do you have a quote that orients you, helps you get your bearings, that you have tacked up on a wall or would even embed in your skin?
I’ll offer some quotes I’ve read lately or in the last few years that, while not posters or tattoos, move me and feel especially resonant right now.
—Diana Farid, Wave (middle grade novel)
Jacqueline Suskin in Help in “Together” from Help in the Dark Season (poetry collection)
—Heather Havrilesky in their Ask Polly substack (newsletter)
Kaitlin B. Curtice, Living Resistance (non-fiction; I read the audiobook version)
From Eleven Words for Love by Randa Abdel-Fattah, illustrated by Maxine Beneba Clarke (picture book)
Ursula LeGuin, Words Are My Matter (collection of essays; I read part of the audiobook)
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Paco De Leon in Finance for the People (non-fiction; current audiobook listen)
Rebecca Solnit in this Guardian article, 2016
Did one or two of these speak to you?
You’re invited to share which or a different quote that illuminates something for you in the comments!
I hope you do!
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