June, out of context
this month's quotables
Each day I pause to write down the things that bring me joy: the places where I experience happiness (‘found joy’) and the places where I contribute to the happiness of others (‘brought joy’).
I also use this notebook to collect random quotes that I find interesting or meaningful or that stand out. At the end of each month I’ll post these random quotes, shared out of context.
Sorry I was so glum. I'm in a cursed mood and can't bear the human face. (Virginia Woolf, Letter to Ethel Smyth, 10th February 1933)
I use the term wide-awakeness … without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, there’s really no awareness, no consciousness.
Consciousness doesn’t come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious.
(Maxine Greene)
I know it’s hard. The world is on fire. Metaphorically, and figuratively. However, it has always been on fire. There has never been a single author that had the immense luxury of writing at a time of absolute peace.
And so, choosing this work, you are entering a lineage of despair. And it’s up to you to turn the sentence into a medium from which we can understand each other and make something new out of this. (Ocean Vuong)
I live in the shadow side of my strengths (Sarah G)
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. (Ansel Adams)
Scott Moe is literally letting Sask burn to the ground instead of asking for assistance from the Federal government. There literally isn't a more toxic male in all of Saskatchewan. (@habpipes.bsky.social)
Throw roses into the abyss and say: "here is my thanks to the monster who didn't succeed in swallowing me alive." (Friedrich Nietzsche)
But while we’re on the subject of cognitive decline, I would just like to pose a brief hypothetical.
Which of these symptoms do you think would be more concerning to a medical professional in assessing the mental acuity of an aging relative?
A) Forgets dates and names
B) Occasionally trips on stairs
C) Believes a former president was secretly executed and replaced by a robot clone as part of an elaborate Democrat conspiracy to lose the election by having the robot be slower and worse than the original guy. (Seth Myers, from A Closer Look)
No one leaves his or her world without being transfixed by its roots.... We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self, soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us... (Paulo Freire)
Don’t become complacent in your compliance. (Maryellen G.)
Are you gonna shoot an elected representative? If you shoot me, you better shoot straight. (Congresswoman Maxine Waters)
Trump is using military forces to stop a protest — I want y'all to consider what kind of government it appears to be when every time we exercise our democratic right to protest, the military is deployed against us. (Doechii at the BET awards)
My goal has always been to subvert as much as possible without hurting anybody's feelings. (Ursula Le Guin)
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me being old then. I was forty-two.
The only tired I was, was tired of giving in. (Rosa Parks)
My loss, by sickness—Was it Loss?
Or that Ethereal Gain
One earns by measuring the Grave—
Then—measuring the Sun—
(Emily Dickinson)
We use our imagination not to escape the world but to join it. (Iris Murdock)
Tomorrow belongs to those of use who conceive of it as belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy. (Audre Lorde)
It is this simple, and it is this difficult. The simple part is the focus on behavior and tiny choices. The difficult part is the volition or volitional skill to keep focused while acknowledging the emotions that are working against this. It's much like someone who is afraid of public speaking who must keep [their] feet planted firmly behind the podium, resisting the impulse to run away, and instead focus on the next line to say.
Success is found in staying put, staying on task. (Timothy Pychyl)
Their story, yours, mine – it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them. (Coles, 1989, p. 30)
How perfect to be aboard a ship with
maybe a hundred years still in my pocket.
But it's late, for all of us,
and in truth the only ship there is
is the ship we are all on
burning the world as we go.
(Mary Oliver)
Find out who you are and do it on purpose. (Dolly Parton)
Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we remember. (Joan Didion)
Betty Friedan walked so we could tweet. (Molly Jong-Fast)
Change, apparently, is not a parade that can be watched as it passes. (Clifford Geetz)
Reflexivity involves coming as close as possible to an awareness of the way I am experienced and perceived by others. It is being able to stay with personal uncertainty, critically informed curiosity as to how others perceive things as well as how I do, and flexibility to consider changing deeply held ways of being. (Bolton 2010)
By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. (Confucius)
Beween feeling and action there is thought. (Sophocles)
The best way to honor our parents' memory is to do something, whether big or small, to make our community just a little better for someone else. (Sophie and Colin Hortman)
We are not at war with Iran. What we are trying to do is make sure we can have peace. (GOP fool Markwayne Mullin)
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. (Aristotle)
When you have a totalitarian regime, you have to save face. (WH Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt)
It is not how old you are, but how you are old. (Jules Renard)
Who "am" I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost "you" only to discover that "I" have gone missing as well. (Judith Butler)
One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this. (Omar El Akkad)
What radical constructivism may suggest to educators is this: the art of teaching has little to do with the traffic of knowledge, its fundamental purpose must be to foster the art of learning. (Ernst von Glasersfeld)
Can we take a rest?
Maybe die for a few
months or years
and wake up when the poem
is complete,
when the flowers in our
garden start to grow,
their scent luring
the sparrows into visiting
our house,
our house that's now
a small forest of rubble.
🍉