November 2011
17 posts
October 2011
23 posts
“
Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.
Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you’re weak where you thought yourself strong. You’ll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid.
What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.
” —Ursula K. LeGuin, A Left-Handed Commencement Address (Mills College, 1983)
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear.”
—
Stephen King (via atomos)
wow this connects
(via nolackofloquaciousness)
“When you go through hell, don’t stop and make a home there.”
—Jean Clervil (via mrchanginglives)
“Sometimes my dad even gets on this kick: you hate this country, you hate the government, and you hate religion. I have to tell him to step back. ‘Dad, I really don’t think you’re watching me. I just hate being lied to’.”
—Bill Hicks (via billhicks)
