girl on fire

Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.

Susan Cain (via skeletales)

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.

Not only do we live among the stars, the stars live within us.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries (via scinerds)

Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular.

When you’re traveling, you are what you are, right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.

Q: Part of the reason we find it such a compelling show is that we expected a kind of fun, light experience and it ended up being much darker and more complex than we thought. Part of that is the development of the characters. They start off as archetypes and it’s been interesting to see them take on a humanity you don’t often see in many genre shows.

Hoechlin: Definitely. I think it’s a tribute to the writers and to everybody involved in that aspect, and also to the actors. Everybody does such a great job in finding things that make it as interesting as possible.

We’re not necessarily a genre show, but it does still have that label around it, and it would be easy to rely on clichés and things that just, you know, describe a character for who they mainly are in the show, just the purpose they serve, and kind of sit back on that. I feel like our show does a great job of incorporating that but never over-using it. The great example of that is Stiles, I mean, he’s obviously the comic relief on the show, but he has these elements like the relationship with his dad and the loss of his mom, and those scenes are the most heartbreaking in the show because you don’t see him do that very often. They’ve done a really good job with that.

africa
does not need your tears
or
your prayers
or
your money,
or
your t-shirts
or
your hands ever so lovingly placed
on her buttocks.
your mouth at her breasts.
she wants you to stop pissing in her face
and
calling it water.
she wants you to leave.
she is the cradle of civilization
and
you hate that.
but,
one day
you will reap
what
you have sown.

why i will never acknowledge a white person as african/ missionary trips are evil, nayyirah waheed (via nayyirahwaheed)

— passion, pain, pleasure: suffering

Airports see more sincere kisses than wedding halls. The walls of hospitals have heard more prayers than the walls of churches.

When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. “This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar,” she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. “My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.”

It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions? How often had I sped past them as I learned of male achievement and men’s place in the history books? Then I read Rosalind Miles’s book “The Women’s History of the World” (recently republished as “Who Cooked the Last Supper?”) and I knew I needed to look again. History is full of fabulous females who have been systematically ignored, forgotten or simply written out of the records. They’re not all saints, they’re not all geniuses, but they do deserve remembering.

I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.

I’m not afraid of dying. Pieces of me die all the time.

Give your daughters difficult names. Give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue. My name makes you want to tell me the truth. My name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right.

Warsan Shire (via wordsthat-speak)

I hate this feeling. Like I’m here. But, I’m not. Like someone cares. But, they don’t. Like I belong somewhere else, anywhere but here.