The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.
Gdansk, Poland
© Jorge Gonzalez with CCLicense
Books can make a difference in dispelling prejudice and building community: not with role models and recipes, not with noble messages about the human family, but with enthralling stories that make us imagine the lives of others. A good story lets you know people as individuals in all their particularity and conflict; and once you see someone as a person—flawed, complex, striving—you’ve reached beyond stereotype.
―Hazel Rochman
© dfinnecy with CCLicense
If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . .
We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it’s too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us– create who we are. It is we who created the system.
© deep warren with CCLicense
It has long been my belief that everyone’s library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner.
© Frank Kovalchek with CCLicense
I don’t think I am like other people. I mean on some deep fundamental level. It’s not just being half a twin and reading a lot and seeing fairies. It’s not just being outside when they’re all inside. I used to be inside. I think there’s a way I stand aside and look backwards at things when they’re happening which isn’t normal.
― Mori, Jo Walton, Among Others
On the Edge of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation looking into Glacier NP
via Rmhermen at en.wikipedia
I don’t know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life by crossing borders. Of course, the crossings are always painful, as well. In most ways, I think border crossing is a very selfish, individualistic act. I’ve come to the point in my life where I encourage young Native Americans to become much more selfish about their personal needs and wants.
Public Domain Image via Pixabay
A complete stranger has the capacity to alter the life of another irrevocably. This domino effect has the capacity to change the course of an entire world. That is what life is; a chain reaction of individuals colliding with others and influencing their lives without realizing it. A decision that seems miniscule to you, may be monumental to the fate of the world.
― J.D. Stroube, Caged by Damnation