"There's an African proverb: 'When death finds you, may it find you alive.' Alive means living your own damned life, not the life that your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live."

--

Source : "Your Own Damn Life". Interview with John Malkin, www.thesunmagazine.org. November 2011.

Michael Meade

#Party Quotes #Mean Quotes #Parent Quotes

“I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments”
“I could claim any number of high-flown reasons for writing, just as you can explain certain dogs behavior... But maybe, itâ€™s that theyâ€™re dog, and thatâ€™s what dogs do.”
“A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You canâ€™t act if you donâ€™t know.”
“While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.”
“All revolutions are bloody. The October Revolution was bloodless, but it was only the beginning”

Source : Dmitri Volkogonov (1998). “Trotsky: Eternal Revolutionary”, Simon and Schuster
“Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.”
“If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness.”
“Etiquette has no regard for moral qualities.”

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