Harmonyeden > Harmonyeden's Quotes

“... Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself with volcanic necessity.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“It seems to me,' said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, 'that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.'
Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: Why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do?”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being. No better instance exists today of what Anwar Abdel Malek calls “the hegemonism of possessing minorities” and anthropocentrism allied with Europocentrism: a white middle-class Westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition “it” is not quite as human as “we” are. There is no purer example than this of dehumanized thought.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general liberal consensus that “true” knowledge is fundamentally nonpolitical (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not “true” knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced. No one is helped in understanding this today when the adjective “political” is used as a label to discredit any work for daring to violate the protocol of pretended suprapolitical objectivity.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter. In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behavior issues out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached, always ready for new examples of what the Description de l'Egypte called "bizarre jouissance." The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“They weren't like us and for that reason deserved to be ruled.”
― Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism

“[C]olonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.”
― Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

“the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.”
― Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

“First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.”
― Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

“it is the colonized man who wants to move forward, and the colonizer who holds things back.”
― Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

“Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“Yaşamımın, öyküdeki yeşil incir ağacı gibi önümde dallanıp budaklandığını görüyordum. Her dalın ucunda tombul, mor bir incir gibi eşsiz bir gelecek beni çağırıyor, göz kırpıyordu. İncirlerden biri, bir eş, mutlu bir yuva ve çocuklardı. Bir başkası, ünlü bir ozan, öteki parlak bir profesör, biri şaşırtıcı editör Ee Gee, öbürü Avrupa, Afrika ve Güney Amerika, biri Constantin, Sokrates, Attila ve garip adları değişik meslekleri olan daha bir yığın aşık, bir başkasıysa Olimpiyat takım şampiyonu bir kadındı. Bu incirlerin üzerinde ve ötesinde, ne olduklarını pek çıkaramadığım daha bir sürü incir daha vardı.
Kendimi dalların çatallandığı noktada otururken görüyordum.
Ve incirlerden hangisini seçeceğime bir türlü karar veremediğim için açlıktan ölüyordum. Hepsini ayrı ayrı istiyordum incirlerin, ama birini seçmek ötekilerin hepsini kaybetmek demekti. Ve ben orada karar veremeden otururken incirler buruşup kararmaya başlıyor ve birer birer toprağa, ayaklarımın dibine düşüyorlardı.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.”
― sylvia plath, The Bell Jar

“I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I hated to serve men in any way.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, for as long as I possibly could.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar