January 10, 2023 · 3 min · 497 words · Stephen Reid
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."
“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
“You can do some rather extraordinary things if that’s what you really believe.”
“Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.”
“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”
“I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.”
“As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.”
“Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”
“You wanna fly, you got to give up the sh-t that weighs you down.”
“When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.”
“If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”
“You are your best thing.”
“We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.”
“Make a difference about something other than yourselves.”
“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
“I don’t think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It’s perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.”
“What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?”
“Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God.”
“In this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”
“To get to a place where you could love anything you chose–not to need permission for desire–well now that was freedom.”
“There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.”
“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
“Something that is loved is never lost.”
“I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.’”
“Anger…it’s a paralyzing emotion…you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling—I don’t think it’s any of that—it’s helpless…it’s absence of control."
Next, 70 of Roald Dahl’s most memorable quotes!
