A Quote by Madison Smartt Bell
One can't do anything alone in Haiti. Sharing and cooperation are so deeply woven into the culture that sometimes it's hard to have a separate thought.
Related Quotes
To think deeply in our culture is to grow angry and to anger others; and if you cannot tolerate this anger, you are wasting the time you spend thinking deeply. One of the rewards of deep thought is the hot glow of anger at discovering a wrong, but if anger is taboo, thought will starve to death.
There is this split between the Haiti of before the earthquake and the Haiti of after the earthquake. So when I'm writing anything set in Haiti now, whether fiction or nonfiction, always in the back of my mind is how people, including some of my own family members, have been affected not just by history and by the present but also by the earthquake.
Health care is very complicated, and the government's had its tentacles woven deeply into this whole charade for over 50 years. But I don't understand why it's this hard that you can't do anything? It's the same thing as, "Well, Rush, you know, once an entitlement's been put into law, Rush, you can't take it away." Yes, you can! It's just you can't have elected people do it thinking they'll get reelected if they do it. But you can do it.
You think of yourself as an "individual person", with a unique and separate mind. You think you are born and you think you die. All your life you feel separate and alone. Sometimes desperately so. You fear death because you fear the loss of individuality. All this is an illusion. You, he, she, those things around you living or not, the stars and galaxies, the empty space in between- these are not distinct, separate objects. All is fundamentally entangled.
Sometimes people who want to understand Haiti from a political perspective may be missing part of the picture. They also need to look at Haiti from a psychological perspective.
Haiti is the poorest country in our hemisphere. The earthquake and the hurricanes, it has devastated Haiti. Bill Clinton and I have been involved in trying to help Haiti for many years.
Our country comes from a centuries-long culture of dehumanizing black and brown bodies. So what role does racism play? A huge role. You can't downplay how deeply woven and embedded this is in our country.
But I think it's very key that there's a plan for Haiti. And we have to begin to - as progressives and people who are concerned about Haiti and have been concerned about Haiti, we have to begin to build some sort of consensus, a movement around the Haiti that the Haitians envision.
Of all the arts, music is the one communal art. It requires for its existence extensive cooperation and organization...Singing together the greatest choral music of all time is the surest way of developing in a community that sense of quality and reverence for beauty, which is the basis of a musical culture...Entertainment has its place in life just as candies and cocktails have, but health is not built on such a diet alone, nor culture exclusively on amusement.
If you look just at the decades after 1934, you know it's hard to point to really inspired and positive support from outside of Haiti, to Haiti, and much easier to point to either small-minded or downright mean-spirited policies.
I mean, we are tribal by nature, and sometimes success and material wealth can divide and separate - it's not a new philosophy I'm sharing - more than hardship, hardship tends to unify.
Judaism and Christianity in themselves are distinctly separate entities, to be sure; but when considering their influence on Western thought, we must bear in mind that Christianity alone, or almost alone, transmitted the Jewish share, simply by what it contained of it in its own, original constitution.
We are learning to perceive existence in separate phases. One phase is to see that we are not our thoughts. As you sit, try and feel what is beyond thought - sense that you are separate from thought.
We are moving from sharing to cooperation to collective action.
My first visit to Haiti was in May 1991, four months into the initial term of Haiti's first democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. At the time, it seemed that Haiti was on the cusp of a new era.
Soul is that part of you that longs for harmony and cooperation and sharing and reverence for life. When you make decisions that align you with those values, you align your personality with your soul. It's that simple to understand. Now to do it, in my experience, is hard.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
German
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist