Words&Dirt

“Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.”

–– “A Poem of Difficult Hope,” from What Are People For?, by Wendell Berry, pg. 62

“‘People are discord,’ Syl said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘You all act differently and think differently. Nothing else is like that––animals act alike, and all spren are, in a sense, virtually the same individual. There’s harmony in that. But not in you––it seems that no two of you can agree on anything. All the world does as it is supposed to, except for humans. Maybe that’s why you so often want to kill each other.’”

––The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson, loc. 5026-35