All-time Favorite Quotes:
"It’s interesting that wisdom often arrives as a warning. I think it’s often something that those in the center, those in power, never know — that before you leave the house, in order to achieve yourself — one sends one’s children to school in order to fulfill their dreams. And in order to do that, they have to be warned that “There is a strike against you, by the way, so sink in. Fade away.” And I think that’s the great crisis of the first and second generation: the first generation made it here, and to live at all is such a privilege that they’re happy, and even encourage you to put your head down: work, fade away, get your meals, and live a quiet life. And I think the second generation, the great conundrum there, the great paradox, is that they want to be seen. They want to make something. And what a better way to make something and feel yourself with agency than to be an artist? So, so many of us immigrant children end up betraying our parents in order to subversively achieve our parents’ dreams.."
- A Life Worthy of Our Breath, Ocean Vuong in conversation with Krista Tippett, On Being
"The crisis of climate change, in particular, is a crisis of disconnection between the facts and the feelings. We know something is true; we don’t feel that it’s true. We don’t live as if it’s true. There is what you might call a kind of stealth denial. We speak as if we believed it, but it’s not obvious from our behavior and the way we vote and what we campaign for, how we talk, that we accept this as a real problem."
- Integrating Our Souls, Systems, and Society, Jonathan Rowson in conversation with Krista Tippett, On Being
"The point isn’t that any one comment or incident is going to push a woman out of tech or make her miserable at work. It’s the constant emotional labor that she has to perform, day after day, just to keep her job and do her work. Often, women will not immediately blame sexism if they feel they are being mistreated or overlooked, rather they question themselves. “Did I do something wrong?” Or, was I not clear enough?” they might think. These concerns wear constantly on self-esteem. Pushing against a stereotype is emotional labor that men, white men in particular, don’t have to perform. Instead, they can use that energy to focus on being a great engineer. Women and minorities, on the other hand, start and end the day at an emotional deficit. It is this “death by a thousand cuts” phenomenon that wears women down – not because they are weak, or because they can’t keep up, but because they are doing a whole extra job."
- Emily Chang, Brotopia - Breaking up the Boy's Club of Silicon Valley
"There is really only one prayer: Give me to do everything I do in the day with a sense of the sacredness of life. Give me to be in Your presence, God, even though I know it only as absence [of the unseen]"
- May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
"It is a cliche of our own time that women spent half a century for 'rights', and the next half wondering whether they wanted them after all. 'Rights' have a dull sound to people who have grown up after they have been won...It has been popular in recent years to laugh at feminism as one of history's dirty jokes: to pity, sniggering, those old-fashioned feminists who fought for women's rights to higher education, careers, the vote... The feminists had only one model, one image, one vision, of a full and free human being: man. For until very recently, only men (though not all men) had the freedom and the education necessary to realize their full abilities, to pioneer and create and discover, and map new trails for future generations. Only men had the vote. Only men had the freedom to love, and enjoy love, and decide for themselves in the eyes of God the problems of right and wrong. Did women want these freedoms because they wanted to be men? Or did they want them because they also were human? Feminism was not a dirty joke. The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a stage of evolution far short of their human capabilities... There were excesses, of course, as in any revolution, ... but they were stemmed from and were a passionate repudiation of the degrading realities of woman's life, the helpless subservience behind the gentle decorum that made women objects of such thinly veiled contempt to men that they even felt contempt for themselves. Evidently, that contempt and self-contempt were harder to get rid of than the conditions which caused them."
- Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique