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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“What happens to us are tiny matters compare to us response to any situation.”

“What happens to us are tiny matters compared to us response to any situation.”

“What happens to women happens to the entire nation. People work hard. But when you're working long hours, you don't get to spend time with your kids, you don't get a chance to take a vacation every now and then, you don't get a chance to make a big purchase (which helps the economy). There's something wrong with that. This isn't about wages, this about quality of life.”

“What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

“What happens when all the parts of childhood are soldered down, when the young no longer have the time or space to play in their family's garden, cycle home in the dark with the stars and moon illuminating their route, walk down through the woods to the river, lie on their backs on hot July days in the long grass, or watch cockleburs, lit by morning sun, like bumblees quivering on harp wires? What then?”

“What happens when it comes to light that in Zen there has always been a large and fundamental role for verbal communication and that, indeed, Zen masters have produced a tremendous volume of writings that originally were based on oral teachings (while the claim for the priority of orality has itself been questioned)? Does this point to a basic contradiction or hypocrisy in Zen, or would the prevalence of literary production mean that our understanding of what constitutes Zen transmission in relation to oral and written discourse must be reconfigured?”

Author:Steven Heine

“What happens when she's not my memory anymore? What happens when she's not around to tell me about his belt leaving scars across my two-year-old brother's face or when he whacked her so hard that she lost her hearing for a week? Who'll be my memory?" Santangelo doesn't miss a beat. "I will. Ring me." "Same," Raffy says. I look at him. I can't even speak because if I do I know I'll cry but I smile and he knows what I'm thinking.”

“What happens when the order of birth and death are disrupted? Stillbirth goes against the way most people think about life and death, and the timeline in which they occur. It's unsettling. When death takes a life before birth, is it a life? I don't know. I don't think there will ever be an answer that feels certain, or one that is right for everyone. But right here, right now, I wonder, is it really just a single breath of air that creates a life? And the absence of it that makes a death?”

“What happens when those of us living at the pace of fashion try to insert an awareness of these much larger cycles into our everyday activity? In other words, what's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year impact of tossing that plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant. Unless we're living in utter harmony with nature, thinking in ten-thousand-year spans is an invitation to a nightmarish obsession. It's a potentially burdensome, even paralyzing, state of mind. Each present action becomes a black hole of possibilities and unintended consequences. We must walk through life as if we had traveled in to the past, aware that any change we make—even moving an ashtray two inches to the left—could ripple through time and alter the course of history. It's less of a Long Now than a Short Forever. This weight on every action—this highly leveraged sense of the moment—hints at another form of present shock that is operating in more ways and places than we may suspect. We'll call this temporal compression overwinding—the effort to squish really big timescales into much smaller or nonexistent ones. It's the effort to make the "now" responsible for the sorts of effects that actually take real time to occur—just like overwinding a watch in the hope that it will gather up more potential energy and run longer than it can.”

“What happens when water gets into a crack and it freezes?" "It expands," I said. "Makes the crack bigger". "Unhealed trauma is a crack. And all the little hard things that trickle into it that would have rolled off someone else, settle. Then when life get cold, that crack gets bigger, longer, deeper. It makes new breaks. You don't know how broken she was or what she was trying to do to fill those cracks. Being broken is not an excuse for bad behavior, you still have to make good choices and do the right thing. But it can be the reason. And sometimes understanding the reason can be what helps you heal.”