“This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.”

— Willa Cather , book My Ántonia

Book II, Ch. 12
My Antonia (1918)
Context: On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.

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Willa Cather 99

American writer and novelist 1873–1947

Diana Wynne Jones (1934–2011) English children's fantasy writer

'About the Author', The Many Worlds of Diana Wynne Jones http://www.dianawynnejones.co.uk/author/default.aspx (HarperCollins, 2005). Retrieved June 14 2005.

“I will pass over my flirtation with journalism as a way of making a living, an idea I dropped when I discovered that in the fifties — unlike now — female journalists always ended up writing the obituaries and the ladies' page. But how was I to make a living? There was not a roaring market in poetry, there, then. I thought of running away and being a waitress, which I later tried, but got very tired and thin; there's nothing like clearing away other people's mushed-up dinners to make you lose your appetite”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

On Writing Poetry (1995)

“Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977) Nigerian writer

On Money and wealth
Source: https://sheleadsafrica.org/20-powerful-chimamanda-adichie-quotes-for-todays-boss-women/

“It is possible to live twenty-four hours a day in a state of love. Every movement, every glance, every thought, and every word can be infused with love.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

“Successful people do things, and get over with it, and leave others to live their life off it. I DO them. And then I leave it to others to live their life off it.”

Shahrukh Khan (1965) Indian actor, producer and television personality

From interview with Anshul Chaturvedi

“People never like me and I never like people," she thought. "And I never can talk as the Crawford children could. They were always talking and laughing and making noises.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett The Secret Garden

Source: The Secret Garden

“I like places where there are people who are different culturally, physically, in every way. And I like to see how they succeed in living together.”

Terry Gilliam (1940) American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe

Terry Gilliam's flying circus (2006)
Context: In the end, people have to learn to live together. That is what I didn't like about America — it is so homogeneous. I like places where there are people who are different culturally, physically, in every way. And I like to see how they succeed in living together.

“Every person has to live his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Variant: I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people.
Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“There are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things.”

Murray Bookchin book Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Source: Post-Scarcity Anarchism

“God, I love the "fine morality" of the wealthy and powerful. You'll spill tears over your own, in a heartbeat. And then never even look twice at people below you, whose very lives are ground under every day, day after day, year after year.”

David Weber (1952) author

quote from W.E.B. Du Havel
"Honorverse", Crown of Slaves (2004)

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