I am speaking to you as I always have—as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.

None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life in struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

“Ah how shameless � the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone they say come all their miseries yes but they themselves with their own reckless ways compound their pains beyond their proper share.�

"We're all just wondering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglas."

“If you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?�

"As soon as he takes it, I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won’t have to feel this. It’s a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be."

"You don't ever have to say anything, always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many's the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity so say nothing."

"I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place,
and new words are needed."

“Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn't care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this world would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.�

“I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.�

"I Know you sometimes think that people are like books. But our lives don't have neat logical plots, and we don't always say beautiful, intelligent things like the character in a novel. that's not the way life is. And we're not like letters." page 116

"There didn't seem to be any logic behind who we turned out to be. None at all" Page 25

“What was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?�
There was only misery or fear, and the absence of misery and fear.
Page 90

“But your life, no matter what you think, you have nothing to be ashamed of, and none of it has been your fault.
Page 105

“I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.�
Page 133

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.�
Page 210

“Life was scary. It was unknowable. Life would happen to them and he would have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them. They all sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold of the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.�
Page 500

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?�
Page 573

“Because he deserved happiness" � Harold
Page 719

“Dear old world, you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.� � Page 390

“What good she would be to us?�

“We might be some good to her�
Page 36

“Kinder Spirits are not so scare as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.� Page 203

“I shall never forget Gilbert Blythe,� said Anne firmly. �And Mr. Philips spelled my name without an e too. The iron has entered into my soul, Diana.� Page 143

“I’ve done my best, and I begin to understand what is meant by the joy of the strife. Next to trying and winning, the best thing is trying and failing.� Page 364

“It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair.
To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.�

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.�

“No physical danger exists. No ghost in all the long histories of ghost has ever hurt anyone physically. The only damage done is by the victim to himself.�

“Fear is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway�

Courage is easy when the alternative is getting killed. It’s hoped that’s hard. You saw something out there that no one else could, and you followed it. Page 857

“I know that science is your god, Paul, but would it be too much to ask for you to pray for us? All of us.� Page 28

“All of us are lonely at some point or another, no matter how many people surround us. And then, we meet someone who seems to understand. She smiles, and for a moment the loneliness disappears�
But love founded only on loneliness and desire will die out before long. A shared history, tradition, and values will link two people more thoroughly than any physical act.� Page 155

“A man might desire something for a moment, while a larger part of him reject it. You’ll need to learn to judge people by their action, not their thoughts.� Page 40.

“I suspect you would find it much easier if we all cast politeness aside, and took whatever we pleased.�
She Considered. “It would be easier, at first. But then you might hurt each other to gain your wishes, and go afraid of each other, and still go on wanting.� Page 97.

“Maybe, she thought as she fastened her cloak, there was some middle ground to be had, a resting place between passion and practicality. She had no idea how they would found it: in all likelihood, they’d have to carve it for themselves out of thin air. And any path they chose would not be an easy one. But perhaps she could allow herself to hope� Page 484.

"Down on the lawns, some people were out sunbathing and there were children, and beds plump with flowers; so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human conflicts and the knowledge of how everything must end."

“She said things may now be changing, but that at least half of men your age just want us to shut up and give you what you want, that you’re spoiled and become contemptible when things don’t go your way.�

“You know what is at the heart of misogyny? When it comes down to it?�

“It’s simply about not giving,� she said. “Whether it’s not giving us the vote or not giving help with the dishes—it’s all clitched to the same wagon.�

Time passed by. I delayed turning to the Lord and postponed from day to day finding life in you.

If we were immortal and lived in unending bodily pleasure, with no fear of losing it, why should we not be happy?
What else should we be seeking for?
I did not realize that that is exactly what shows our great wretchedness.
For I was so submerged and blinded that I could not think of the light of moral goodness and of beauty to be embrace for its own sake -- beauty seen not by the eye of the flesh, but only by inward discernment.

“Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it put aside nonsense and distraction and become itself again.�

“I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification."

“Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view. Scarcity is said to create value, after all. Of course value is meaningful concept only where there is relationship, someone to do the valuing. If only to prove that I can, I will forbid myself recourse to theology and proceed as if God is an unnecessary hypothesis here because we ourselves can value our own kind. There is perhaps nothing more startling about human circumstance than the fact that no hypothesis can be called necessary, that we are suspended in time ungrounded by any first premise, try as we may to find or contrive one.�

“As God bestoweth his benefites upon us, let us beware that wee acknowledge it towards him, by doing good to our neighbors whom he offereth unto us, so as wee neither exempt ourselves from their want, nor seclude them from our abundance, but gently make them partakers with us, as folke that are linked together in an inseparable bond.�

"I remember when I was a child at Coolin or Sagle or Talache, walking into the woods by myself and feeling the solitude around me build like electricity and pass through my body with a jolt that made my hair prickle. I remember kneeling by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakably tender growth of small trees already sprouting from their backs, and thinking, there is only one thing wrong here, which is my own presence, and that is the slightest imaginable intrusion--feeling that my solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a place."

“I am vehemently grateful that, by whatever means, I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity. It may be mere historical conditioning, but when I see a man or a woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly.�

“There is something about being human that makes us love and crave grand narratives�.
Narratives always implies cause and consequence. It creates paradigmatic structures around which experience can be ordered, and this is certainly would account for the craving for it, which might as well be called a need.�

“What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to - power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?�

“to describe the processes of ontogeny or mortality does not explain why we are born or why we die�.
Explanation would necessarily involve an account of the intention behind their making. So, perhaps the very idea of explanation is an error of anthropomorphism when it is applied to things that do not involve human intention. The belief that divine purpose lies behind nature of course invites anthropomorphism because of the presumed likeness between God and humankind, the idea that the making of the cosmos was intentional in a sense meaningful to us.�

"Dia menunjukkan sikap santun kepada dirinya sendiri, kepada binatang-binatangnya, kepada pohon juniper tempat dia berlutut dihadapannya, dan kepada Tuhan yang tengah diajaknya berkomunikasi."

"Kalau ada cinta yang sangat besar, maka akan selalu ada mukjizat.....

Bagiku, segala mukjizat Gereja tidak terletak pada wajah, atau suara atau kekuatan penyembuhan yang tiba-tiba mendatangi kita dari suatu tempat yang jauh, melainkan pada presepsi-presepsi kita yang telah diasah menjadi lebih halus, lebih peka, sehingga untuk sesaat mata kita bisa melihat dan telinga kita bisa mendengar hal-hal yang sesungguhnya selalu ada di sekitar kita."

"Melalui persahabatannya dengan Eusabio, Bapa Latour menaruh minat terhadap bangsa Navajo...
Bapa Latour bisa merasakan bahwa mereka memiliki karakter yang jauh lebih unggul. Ada keyakinan dan tujuan di balik sikap mereka yang tertutup dan sulit dibaca; sesuatu yang aktif dan gesit, sesuatu yang cerdas. Pengusiran bangsa Navajo dari tanah leluhur, yang sudah menjadi milik mereka sejak dahulu kala, bagi Bapa Latour adalah suatu ketidakadilan yang tidak terampuni."

"Kemampuan berpikir kritis adalah kemerdekaan untuk berpikir sendiri.
Keleluasaan untuk mengumpulkan informasi secara utuh, memprosesnya secara terstruktur, sehingga kita dapat membuat keputusan terbaik atau mencari solusi yang paling efektif.

Dengan berpikir kritis, kita sedang mengembangkan kesadaran atas "diri". Ketika memproses input dari luar, menggunakan sistem 2 berarti kita memahami apa yanng menyusun sistem 1 kita. Pada level yang lebih dalam lagi, menggunakan sistem 2 artinya memahami sistem 1 lawan bicara kita. Jadi, kurang tepat apabila berpikir kritis diasosiasikan dengan mereka yang sekedar anti terhadap ide-ide.

Kemampuan berpikir kritis termasuk kemampuan berempati, mengomunikasikan kesimpulan, keputusan, atau tindakan yang diambil tersebut dengan framing yang dapat diterima."

"yang berbahaya adalah ketika kita menginternalisasi label dan ekspektasi sedemikian rupa, sampai merasa ada batasan dalam bagaimana kita harus bertindak atau merespon suatu kejadian, tanpa berpikir ulang tentang dari mana impuls respons itu berasal.
Membebaskan diri dari label dan ekspektasi berarti memiliki keleluasaan untuk mengambil cukup waktu dan melihat pilihan respons lain."

"Ketika seorang saintis menggambarkan manusia sebagai primata pembunuh, media cepat memberitakan karyanya. Jika koleganya berpendapat sebaliknya, hampir tak ada yang mendengarkan.
Saya jadi bertanya-tanya: apa kita disesatkan kesukaan kita terhadap horor dan pertunjukan? Bagaimana bila kebenaran saintifik berkebalikan dengan yang digembar-gemborkan publikasi paling laris dan paling sering dikutip?"

My name is Ruth�.

Like a deep cold lake, Housekeeping unravels so many layers of question. The atmosphere suddenly pulls you into a dark and lonely passage from Ruth.

The idea of identity and then the question of what was one's death impact on the one who's left behind.
How do the memories of the lost one fill the spaces only when they were gone?
And what is loneliness when one wants to respect their own transient mind?
The fascinating questions rendered the story in a beautifully lyrical way. Also, there is this idea about the people who have a transient life connected with the story of Cain, he is the first and the one who created sorrow.

“If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected � an arrival, an explanation, an apology.�

Fingerbone is a deserted town where there is only one way to go in and out. Ruth and Lucille are abandoned by their mother and left in Fingerbone with the care of the eccentric aunt, Sylvie Foster. Sylvie has her own way of living and it seems to resonate with Ruth. There are basically stories from 3 generations of Fosters, here in Fingerbone they are all connected but the story focuses on Ruth and Sylvie and somehow the dampness and the extreme weather of Fingerbone really set the tone of this book.

Sylvie liked to eat supper in the dark�

Sylvie might not be the best caretaker, she has a wandering mind but she is the only one who understands what Ruth and Lucille have been through. The characters are divided into two kinds of identity, one is the one who’s intuitive and contemplative to be alone with themselves and another kind is the one who needs communal society. It’s really compelling how wonderfully Robinson shows this without making the character interior to another.

For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires...
when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it?

It’s only 200 pages, but the sentences become so dense that I need to reread them several times. Strangely, the sophisticated narrative made me want to revisit someday to see if I could get a new perspective. I can see that this book could save someone’s life, specifically the one who has been through a loss and fear of abandonment. Grief, loss, and loneliness are knitted flawlessly into this story, and the ability of a writer to put the unbearable thing into words makes this kind of literature a place for transcendence and a wonderful shelter.

“When we were children and frightened of the dark, my grandmother used to say if we keep our eyes closed we would not see it. That was when I noticed the correspondence between the space within the circle of my skull and the space around me. I saw just the same figure against the lid of my eye or the wall of my room, or in the tree beyond my window. Even the illusion of perimeters fails when families are separated.�

"Neurological illnesses such as depression, ADHD, BPD, and burnout syndrome mark the landscape of pathology at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They are not infections, but infarction."

"The positivation of the world allows new forms of violence to emerge. They do not stem from the immunologically Other. Rather, they are immanent in the system itself. Because of this immanent, they do not involve immune defense. Neuronal violence leading to psychic infractions is a terror of immanence.
The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates, it does not exclude, it exhaust."

"the depressive human being is an animal laborans that exploits itself - and it does so voluntarily, without external constraints. it is predator and prey at once."

"The animal is forced to divide its attention between various activities. That is why animals are incapable of contemplative immersion."

"Take care when gathering information. We live mainly on information. We see very little for ourselves and live on others testimony. Hearing is truth's last entry point, and a lie's first. Truth is normally seen and rarely heard. It rarely reaches us unadulterated, especially when it comes from far off. It is always tinged with the emotions through which it has passed. Passion tints everything it touches, making it odious or pleasing. It always tries to make an impression, so consider carefully a person offering praise, and even more so someone uttering abuse. The greatest attention is needed here to discover their intention by knowing beforehand where they're coming from. Let caution weigh up what's missing and what's false."

“Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.�

"the people often felt the need to prepare a side of themselves to display to passers-by - as they might in a store window - and that such display needn't be taken so seriously once the moment had passed" - page 85

“If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.� - Helen

"what happiness it is to sit in intimate conversation with someone of like mind, warmed by candid discussion of the amusing and fleeting ways of this world... but such a friend is hard to find, and instead you sit there doing your best to fit in with whatever the other is saying, feeling deeply alone."

"status and personal appearance are things one is born with, after all, but surely the inner man can always be improved with effort."

"People steal from extremity. There will be no end to crime while the world is not governed well, and men suffer from cold and starvation. It is cruel to make people suffer and drive them to break the law, then treat the poor creatures as criminals."

"It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met."

“What force moves the nations?�

“Through his reason man observes himself, but only through consciousness does he know himself.�
Epilogue Part Two Chapter 8

“Who is right and who is wrong? No one! But if you are alive � live tomorrow you’ll die as I might have died an hour ago. And is it worth tormenting oneself, when one has only a moment of life in comparison with eternity?�

“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom�
Book Two, Part Two

"If life has any meaning or purpose, you won't find it in happiness, but in something more rational, in something greater. Doing Good!."

“The fireman said there were little fires everywhere. Multiple points of origin. Possible use of an accelerant. Not an accident.�

“Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.�

"She had learned that when people were bent on doing something they believed was a good deed, it was usually impossible to dissuade them.�

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

"As the cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London;
and fall on the mind. Effort ceases.
Time flaps on the mast.
There we stop; there we stand.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said to himself;
feeling hollowed out, utterly empty within.
Clarissa refused me, he thought.
He stood there thinking,
Clarissa refused me."

"So he was deserted. The whole world was clamoring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes?
food was pleasant; the sun hot, and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, by sucking a gas pipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know....

But even Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world."

“He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear.�

"What do you do?"
I used to think it was synonymous with How much money do you make?
But lately I've begun to think it's the most important question you can ask someone.
"What do yo do?
What are you doing?
What is your method of conducting life,
by what means do you move through the
world?"

I'm going to ask what you do in a minute,
bear with me, but first, what's the most
important question you've ever been?"

“I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.�

”It was true what Hermes said. Every moment mortals died, by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect, and age. It was their fate, as Prometheus had told me, the story that they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke. Meanwhile, every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark."

“your mother wanted me to name the cat Feuerbach, but you insisted on Soapy.�

“That is how life goes. We send our children into the wilderness.�

“There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world’s mortal insufficiency to us.�

“I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave-that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hand and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.�

"This is what I love about Daniel. Most likely, he never imagined himself as a prisoner of war, someone whose strong faith not only withstood the enormous cultural pressure around him but also impressed those holding him captive."