Sea > Sea's Quotes

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
― Michael Scott, The Warlock

“We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.”
― Orson Scott Card

“She never utters a sound even when she's crying, and that makes me a little sad. Doesn't seem right. When you cry, people should hear you. The world should stop.”
― Libba Bray, Going Bovine

“I don't think you should die until you're ready. Until you've wrung out every last bit of living you can.”
― Libba Bray, Going Bovine

“You've influenced the world not because you wanted to hug it and cuddle it and call it sweet thing, but because one day you wanted to beat the crap out of somebody but you didn't. You made a painting instead.”
― Libba Bray, Going Bovine

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."

I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
― Audre Lorde

“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
― Audre Lorde

“Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose
the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution,
but more usually
we must do battle where we are standing.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.”
― Audre Lorde

“I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.”
― Audre Lorde

“Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”
― Audre Lorde

“There are no bargains between lion and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles,” Chiron said. “And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean?

It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. LIke genius she is ignorant of what she does.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.'
Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest.
Feel for yourself.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Somewhere between fear and sex passion is.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Did I do anything last night that suggested I was sane?”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“I am not what you see and hear.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow. ”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red