Maryam > Maryam's Quotes

“Whatever your brilliance, your pessimism, your thoughts about existence, the answer is always... Life. It's not a dialectical idea, it's a lived contradiction. Gramsci said, 'We have to be pessimists in our thinking and optimists in our actions.”
― Agnes Varda, Agnes Varda: Interviews

“Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.”
― Albert Camus

“As one would expect of tourists, they tried to find poverty colourful,”
― Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition

“Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the twenty-first century must be left to answer.


”
― Eric Hobsbawm

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935

“Instead of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader

“Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment...'dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us.' Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.”
― bell hooks

“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
― Bell Hooks

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde

“When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called "cathexis". I his book Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us "confuse cathecting with loving." We all know how often individuals of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting of neglecting them. Since their feiling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love.
When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
― audre lorde

“If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time. ”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“آن نخل ناخلف که تبر شد ز ما نبود
ما را زمانه گر شکند، ساز می شویم”
― محمدعلی صائب تبریزی