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“In the cherry blossom's shade
there's no such thing
as a stranger.”
― Kobayashi Issa

“The Forbidden Forest looked as though it had been enchanted, each tree smattered with silver, and Hagrid's cabin looked like an iced cake.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

“When laced into his clothing, Laurent's dangerous grace lent him an almost androgynous quality. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that it was rare to associate Laurent with a physical body at all: you were always dealing with a mind.”
― S.U. Pacat, Captive Prince: Volume Two

“In the early years, it was my fear that drove my need to understand. i did not want to be destroyed. In fact i wanted to be created.”
― Guy Baldwin, Slavecraft: Roadmaps for Erotic Servitude: Principles, Skills and Tools

“Looked at from the vantage points offered by fictional stories, slavery, like the glass viewed from above, at first glance, can appear to be merely trivial, two-dimensional, erotic behavior that is not deserving of any serious attention.”
― Guy Baldwin, Slavecraft: Roadmaps for Erotic Servitude: Principles, Skills and Tools

“The Flower-Crowned Martial God; Sword in one hand, flower in the other. Shi QingXuan only remembered the flower, but had forgotten: Xie lian ascended because of his sword.”
― M¨° Xi¨¡ng T¨®ngxi¨´, Ìì¹Ù´Í¸£ [Ti¨¡n Gu¨¡n C¨¬ F¨²]

“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

“To run with the wolf was to run in the shadows, the dark ray of life, survival and instinct. A fierceness that was both proud and lonely, a tearing, a howling, a hunger and thirst. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst. A strength that would die fighting, kicking, screaming, that wouldn't stop until the last breath had been wrung from its body. The will to take one's place in the world. To say 'I am here.' To say 'I am.”
― O. R. Melling

“White women¡ªfeminists included¡ªhave revealed a historical reluctance to acknowledge the struggles of household workers. They have rarely been involved in the Sisyphean task of ameliorating the conditions of domestic service. The convenient omission of household workers¡¯ problems from the programs of ¡°middle-class¡± feminists past and present has often turned out to be a veiled justification¡ªat least on the part of the affluent women¡ªof their own exploitative treatment of their maids.

In 1902 the author of an article entitled ¡°A Nine-Hour Day for Domestic Servants¡± described a conversation with a feminist friend who had asked her to sign a petition urging employers to furnish seats for women clerks.

¡°The girls,¡± she said, ¡°have to stand on their feet ten hours a day and it makes my heart ache to see their tired faces.¡±
¡°Mrs. Jones,¡± said I, ¡°how many hours a day does your maid stand upon her feet?¡±
¡°Why, I don¡¯t know,¡± she gasped, ¡°five or six I suppose.¡±
¡°At what time does she rise?¡±
¡°At six.¡± ¡°And at what hour does she finish at night?¡±
¡°Oh, about eight, I think, generally.¡±
¡°That makes fourteen hours ¡­¡±
¡°¡­ (S)he can often sit down at her work.¡±
¡°At what work? Washing? Ironing? Sweeping? Making beds? Cooking? Washing dishes? ¡­ Perhaps she sits for two hours at her meals and preparing vegetables, and four days in the week she has an hour in the afternoon. According to that, your maid is on her feet at least eleven hours a day with a score of stair-climbings included. It seems to me that her case is more pitiable than that of the store clerk.¡±

My caller rose with red cheeks and flashing eyes. ¡°My maid always has Sunday after dinner,¡± she said.
¡°Yes, but the clerk has all day Sunday. Please don¡¯t go until I have signed that petition. No one would be more thankful than I to see the clerks have a chance to sit ¡­”
― Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class

“True nobility is to exercise power as a servant to all and master of none.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Keep your eyes down and don't speak unless you're spoken to were the only two rules a servant had to follow, and those just so happened also to be the basics of espionage.”
― Danielle Bennett, Dragon Soul

“...talent means nothing, while experience, acquired in humility and with hard work, means everything.”
― Patrick S¨¹skind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four

“When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“Stagnation is self-abdication.”
― Ryan Talbot

“The poor man retains the prejudices of his forefathers without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues; he has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions, without understanding the science which puts it to use; and his selfishness is no less blind than was formerly his devotedness to others. If society is tranquil, it is not because it is conscious of its strength and its well-being, but because it fears its weakness and its infirmities; a single effort may cost it its life. Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure. The desires, the repinings, the sorrows, and the joys of the present time lead to no visible or permanent result, like the passions of old men, which terminate in impotence.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“What holds true for the individual holds true for a society. It is never static; if it does not grow, it decays; if it does not transcend the status quo for the better, it changes for the worse. Often we, the individual or the people who make up a society, have the illusion we could stand still and not alter the given situation in the one or the other direction. This is one of the most dangerous illusions. The moment we stand still, we begin to decay.”
― Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology

“He wanted me to come home--to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond.”
― James Baldwin

“Dr. Chanter, in his brilliant History of Human Thought in the Twentieth Century, has made the suggestion that only a very small proportion of people are capable of acquiring new ideas of political or social behaviour after they are twenty-five years old. On the other hand, few people become directive in these matters until they are between forty and fifty. Then they prevail for twenty years or more. The conduct of public affairs therefore is necessarily twenty years or more behind the living thought of the times. This is what Dr. Chanter calls the "delayed
realisation of ideas".

In the less hurried past this had not been of any great importance, but in the violent crises of the Revolutionary Period it became a primary fact. It is evident now that whatever the emergency, however obvious the new problem before our species in the nineteen-twenties, it was necessary for the whole generation that had learned nothing and could learn nothing from the Great War and its sequelae, to die out before any rational handling of world affairs could even begin. The cream of the youth of the war years had been killed; a stratum of men already middle-aged remained in control, whose ideas had already set before the Great War. It was, says Chanter, an inescapable phase. The world of the Frightened Thirties and the Brigand Forties was under the dominion of a generation of unteachable, obstinately obstructive men, blinded men, miseducating, misleading the baffled younger people for completely superseded ends. If they could have had their way, they would have blinded the whole world for ever. But the blinding was inadequate, and by the Fifties all this generation and its teachings and traditions were passing away, like a smoke-screen blown aside.

Before a few years had passed it was already incredible that in the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century the whole political life of the world was still running upon the idea of competitive sovereign empires and states. Men of quite outstanding intelligence were still planning and scheming for the "hegemony" of Britain or France or Germany or Japan; they were still moving their armies and navies and air forces and making their combinations and alliances upon the dissolving chess-board of terrestrial reality. Nothing happened as they had planned it; nothing worked out as they desired; but still with a stupefying inertia they persisted. They launched armies, they starved and massacred populations. They were like a veterinary surgeon who suddenly finds he is operating upon a human being, and with a sort of blind helplessness cuts and slashes more and more desperately, according to the best equestrian rules. The history of European diplomacy between 1914 and 1944 seems now so consistent a record of incredible insincerity that it stuns the modern mind. At the time it seemed rational behaviour. It did not seem insincere. The biographical material of the period -- and these governing-class people kept themselves in countenance very largely by writing and reading each other's biographies -- the collected letters, the collected speeches, the sapient observations of the leading figures make tedious reading, but they enable the intelligent student to realise the persistence of small-society values in that swiftly expanding scene.

Those values had to die out. There was no other way of escaping from them, and so, slowly and horribly, that phase of the moribund sovereign states concluded.”
― H.G. Wells, The Holy Terror

“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I'm all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I'm something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast, and that I seek, like such a beast, with my little strength, such a beast, with nothing of its species left but fear and fury, no, the fury is past, nothing but fear, nothing of all its due but fear centupled, fear of its shadow, no, blind from birth, of sound then, if you like, we'll have that, one must have something, it's a pity, but there it is, fear of sound, fear of sounds, the sounds of beasts, the sounds of men, sounds in the daytime and sounds at night, that's enough, fear of sounds all sounds, more or less, more or less fear, all sounds, there's only one, continuous, day and night, what is it, it's steps coming and going, it's voices speaking for a moment, it's bodies groping their way, it's the air, it's things, it's the air among the things, that's enough, that I seek, like it, no, not like it, like me, in my own way, what am I saying, after my fashion, that I seek, what do I seek now, what it is, it must be that, it can only be that, what it is, what it can be, what what can be, what I seek, no, what I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, they say I seek what it is I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, what it can possibly be, and where it can possibly come from, since all is silent here, and the walls thick, and how I manage, without feeling an ear on me, or a head, or a body, or a soul, how I manage, to do what, how I manage, it's not clear, dear dear, you say it's not clear, something is wanting to make it clear, I'll seek, what is wanting, to make everything clear, I'm always seeking something, it's tiring in the end, and it's only the beginning.”
― Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

“To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”
― Lao Tse

“To know that you do not know is the best.
To think you know when you do not is a disease.
Recognizing this disease as a disease is to be free of it.”
― Lao Tzu

“If a person seems wicked, do not cast him away. Awaken him with your words, elevate him with your deeds, repay his injury with your kindness. Do not cast him away; cast away his wickedness.”
― Lao-Tzu

“Knowledge is a treasure, but practice is the key to it.”
― Lao Tzu

“Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Some of us aren't meant to belong. Some of us have to turn the world upside down and shake the hell out of it until we make our own place in it.”
― Elizabeth Lowell, Remember Summer

“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!”
― Eugene O'Neill

“Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis