“We dig up what is left of life crushed to carbon beneath us, and we burn it: to make important things, really—hospital intensive care units, synthetically derived insulin and steel beams for the new high school library. But we burn it for nothing, too, really, for vanity and emptiness.”

—  Laurie Zoloth

"Interrupting Your Life: An Ethics for the Coming Storm" (2014)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "We dig up what is left of life crushed to carbon beneath us, and we burn it: to make important things, really—hospital …" by Laurie Zoloth?
Laurie Zoloth photo
Laurie Zoloth 5
American ethicist 1950

Related quotes

Anne Sexton photo

“We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Source: Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

“I know that sometimes the things we carry become too much for us. We are burned down, but somehow we have to pick ourselves up and keep going”

Paullina Simons book The Summer Garden

Source: The Summer Garden

Aldous Huxley photo

“Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.”

Aldous Huxley book Point Counter Point

Source: Point Counter Point

Richard Koch photo

“The key is to work out the few things that are really important, and the few methods that will give us what we really want.”

Richard Koch (1950) German medical historian and internist

The 80/20 Individual (2003)

Suzanne Collins photo

“And if we burn, you burn with us.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Variant: Fire is catching! And if we burn, you burn with us!
Source: Mockingjay

Hank Green photo

“We often just accept the things that we like and complain a lot about the things that we don't like. But if we could, like, intensely dwell on the really great things in life the way we intensely dwell on the negative things in life. I think that would be fantastic.”

Hank Green (1980) American vlogger

A Few Of My Favorite Things http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBWH4eMiklU
Youtube

“Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.”

Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) American poet

"Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day" ( full text online http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/calmly-we-walk-through-this-april-s-day/); this poem has also been printed under the title "For Rhoda"
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)
Context: Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

Laurie Anderson photo

“And you know the reason I really love the stars is that we cannot hurt them.
We can't burn them or melt them or make them overflow. We can't flood them or blow them up or turn them out.
But we are reaching for them.
We are reaching for them.”

Laurie Anderson (1947) American musician

"Another Day in America" (2010)
Homeland (2010)

Sigmund Freud photo

“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Letter to Ernest Jones (1933), as quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) by Robert Andrews, p. 779
1930s

Don Marquis photo

“fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while”

Don Marquis (1878–1937) American writer

Related topics