Quotes
The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.
– David Viscott
We have no reason at all to think that our pets have the core human capacity to see their lives as an unfolding narrative, with plans for the future and a story to tell of their pasts. [My cat] Pixel never had a single project in his life, an activity that required more than one session working at it to complete. He had only tasks: catch a mouse, eat, open the door, sharpen his claws on our furniture, curl up in any empty cardboard box left open.
...
That prized and celebrated ability to be entirely in the moment means the animal has not been deprived of an anticipated future. It has no dreams unfulfilled, no scores unsettled, no wrongs left to right. It was granted a finite time on Earth, and that going well is the best an animal could hope for. Exactly how many good moments it has is of little or no importance. More days means more of the same. The total quantity of pleasure it would have experienced may have increased but the overall quality of the life as a whole would not alter. With humans, it is different. An extra year, or even month or week, can be the difference between seeing your grandchild or not, finishing a book or not, seeing a new city or not. We might also do a cherished thing one more time, experiencing it in a different way, knowing we are doing it for the last time. A human can treasure the bittersweet feeling of a last look over a favourite view, a final cigar, a parting hug. Again, it is through a temporal lens that the differences between our lives and the lives of our pets is most apparent.
Pixel may have had no plans or ambitions, and was mercifully oblivious to the fact he was going to die. Yet there is something remarkable about any even moderately complex sentient life, which makes its passing poignant. It is wondrous to be alive, and in our pets we see lives that are wonderful in ways we can only vaguely imagine. For such a life to be snuffed out is a real cause for sadness. Something beautiful and unique is removed from the world.
— Julian Baggini in "Goodbye Pixel"
"I've often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it's inside a frame."
— Abbas Kiarostami
"Patience is also a form of action."
— Auguste Rodin
"...race is the child of racism, not the father."
— Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me
"I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble."
— Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me
"Poetry aims for an economy of truth — loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions — beautiful writing rarely is. I wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations. Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life."
— Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me
"This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream. Historians conjured the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories. John Carter flees the broken Confederacy for Mars. We are not supposed to ask what, precisely, he was running from. I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as 'just some good ole boys, never meanin' no harm' — a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one."
— Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me
"The moment the officers began their pursuit of Prince Jones, his life was in danger. The Dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business, accept our bodies as currency, because it is their tradition. As slaves we were this country’s first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies became this country’s second mortgage. In the New Deal we were their guestroom, their finished basement. And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today, when 8 percent of the world’s prisoners are black men, our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value."
— Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me
"I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves."
— Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me