A Quote by Jesmyn Ward

Young people have a right to optimism, and rightly so; human beings have grown and developed and accomplished wonderful feats in the world. But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It's tiring.
The most important part of my practice as an artist has been remembering to stay humble. There is so much hurt, so much sorrow, so much pain in the world, and I think when you're born and bred into privilege, it's easier to have a closed perspective on things. But there's this opportunity that's open to all of us to let empathy connect us back to one another.
...people think non-violence is really weak and non-militant. These are misconceptions that people have because they don't understand what non-violence means. Non-violence takes more guts, if I can put it bluntly, than violence. Most violent acts are accomplished by getting the opponent off guard, and it doesn't take that much character, I think, if one wants to do it.
If we know how much passive violence we perpetrate against one another, we will understand why there is so much physical violence plaguing societies and the world.
Trump is much, much worse than people understand. In his ideal world, you would have an alliance between Trump, Putin, Marine Le Pen, maybe a right winger might knock off Merkel in Germany, and you'd have this sort of, essentially, a nationalist populist alliance that can only be made sense of when seen as a right-wing, white nationalism against the world. Because, who do they want to fight? They want to fight Asia and China, they want to fight Latin America and Mexico.
That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.
Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.
The brute animals have all the same sensations of pain as human beings, and consequently endure as much pain when their body is hurt; but in their case the cruelty of torment is greater, because they have no mind to bear them up against their sufferings, and no hope to look forward to when enduring the last extreme pain.
We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much, if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?...I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing; but the eye that blinks, that is something.
And the pain is too much it's too much it's too much and my hands are on my head and I'm rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that's inside me. And i fall back into it.
Conservatives are tougher. They fight harder, they fight for their own, and they're willing to win for themselves and they're willing to impose pain on the opposition. Liberals are much less willing to do that. They're much more - they would much rather give to everybody.
During the fight you really don't feel much; you've got so much adrenaline going. Luckily I've mostly been on the winning side, so I haven't felt much pain inside the octagon.
Human beings are not our enemy. Our enemy is not the other person. Our enemy is the violence, ignorance, and injustice in us and in the other person. When we are armed with compassion and understanding, we fight not against other people, but against the tendency to invade, to dominate, and to exploit.
There's not a woman in this world that can beat me if we put on a pair of gloves and we fight. I've accomplished so much.
My life is so much better, it's so much more enriched if I make the effort, if I actually celebrate with gladitude the fact that I get to be on this gorgeous planet.
It's like everything in your life is wonderful, but you have so much wonderful - this is all going to sound horrible - but when you have so much wonderful, it isn't wonderful because you don't actually have time to enjoy it.
Do you think you can love too much? Or experience too much beauty, at the cost of too much pain? Do you think when art is defined by expressing so much beauty and so much pain, just to be able to cope with both - and bring other people something creatively beautiful at the cost of that pain - that we can draw a line of 'normalcy'? It's important to think about.
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