Sarah Rodriguez > Sarah's Quotes

“There’s no such thing as safety on this planet. No one knows that much. No one ever will. Not only about the world but about himself. That’s why it’s unsafe. This is what the whole sense of tragedy is really about. People think that a sense of tragedy is a kind of … embroidery, something irrelevant, that you can take or leave. But, in fact, it is a necessity. That’s what the Blues and Spirituals are all about. It is the ability to look on things as they are and survive your losses, or even not survive them—to know that your losses are coming. To know they are coming is the only possible insurance you have, a faint insurance, that you will survive them.”
― James Baldwin

“I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.”
― Albert Schweitzer

“Man's sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things are marks of a strange disorder.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“We’re getting old, he thought, and it damn sure didn’t take long.”
― James Baldwin, Another Country

“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.”
― John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice: Volume I. The Foundations

“This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.”
― John Ruskin

“All great art is praise.”
― John Ruskin, Lectures on Art

“All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

“You see a child play, and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word. You can see how he solves his problems. You can also see what's wrong. Young children, especially, have enormous creativity, and whatever's in them rises to the surface in free play.”
― Erik H. Erikson

“Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.”
― John Ruskin

“Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don’t experience your self as “natural” or “inevitable”—as so many other people seem to do—and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages. Not to take yourself as a natural, unquestionable entity can lead you in turn to become aware of the radical contingency of life in general, its supremely accidental nature.”
― Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays

“Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future.

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

“What is more tormenting than a meeting after a long time, when all the words fall to the ground like dead things, and the spirit that should animate them floats disembodied in the air? We both felt its presence.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

“We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.”
― Isaiah Berlin

“This is what it means to live beyond the “end of nature”—that it is human action that will determine the climate of the future, not systems beyond our control. And it’s why, despite the unmistakable clarity of the predictive science, all of the tentative sketches of climate scenarios that appear in this book are so oppressively caveated with possiblys and perhapses and conceivablys. The emergent portrait of suffering is, I hope, horrifying. It is also, entirely, elective. If we allow global warming to proceed, and to punish us with all the ferocity we have fed it, it will be because we have chosen that punishment—collectively walking down a path of suicide. If we avert it, it will be because we have chosen to walk a different path, and endure.”
― David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

“The stars are not wanted now, put out every one
Pack up the moon & dismantle the sun.”
― W.H. Auden

“To find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

“Thus the story of the facts has to reckon with filters, deferments, partial truths, half lies: from it comes an arduous measurement of time passed that is based completely on the unreliable measuring device of words.”
― elena ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.”
― Blaise Pascal

“In the depths of his soul Ivan Ilyich knew that he was dying... he simply did not, he could not possibly understand it. The example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter's logic - Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal-- had seemed to him all his life to be correct only in relation to Caius, but by no means himself. For the man Caius, man in general, it was perfectly correct; but he was not Caius and not man in general, he had always been quite, quite separate from all other human beings...And Caius is indeed mortal, and it's right that he die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and thoughts-- for me it's another matter. And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too terrible.

So it felt to him.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth — look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.”
― Soren Kierkegaard