Quotes About Contradiction

Pero mi vida no sólo está acechada por el porvenir, también lo está por los fantasmas de mi propio pasado, que surgieron luego del deceso de quien encarnaba todo lo que yo había querido abandonar, todo con lo que había querido romper y que, seguramente, había constituido para mí una suerte de modelo social negativo, un contrapunto en el trabajo que había llevado a cabo para crearme a mí mismo.

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

Why are free spirits always so fucking dumb?

We have our self-importance. We also have our inadequacy. The former is a desperate invention of the latter.

Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred.

What ambiguity there is in exalted things. We despise them a little.

How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing?

this is the woman you are inside the life. looking at you, what? i'm more excited than i've been since the first burning nights of adolescent frenzy. excited and confused. i look at you and feel an erection stirring even as the situation argues strenuously against it. _Eric Packer

The daughters are tired of kissing each other, although some are not.

Essays, like poems and stories and novels, marry heaven and hell. Contradiction is the cellular structure of life. Sometimes north dominates, sometimes south—but if the essay doesn't include contraries, however small they be, the essay fails.

I am willing to express a theory. I am willing to admit I'm afraid. I'm willing to contradict something I've said before. I'm willing to have a knee-jerk reaction, even a wrong one. I'm willing to apologize. I'm perfectly willing to be perfectly human.

There are many ideas within Christian spirituality that contradict the facts of reality as I understand them. A statement like this offends some Christians because they believe if aspects of their faith do not obey the facts of reality, they are not true. But I think there are all sorts of things our hearts believe that don't make any sense to our heads.

love makes us both strong and weak at the same time. I

And I know I said earlier that he was perfect but he wasn't perfect, far from it; he could be silly and vain and remote and often cruel and still we loved him, in spite of, because.

I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back. But I wouldn't say that. It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart.

This whole town is like a big Fuck You to Thoreau.

What if—is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes—the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?

The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it.

and yet isn't it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn't quite work, that's oddly the dearest?

how even my sadness can make me happy

In my opinion, the greatest sin in the church of Jesus Christ in this generation is ignorance of the Word of God. Many times I have heard a church officer say, "Well I don't know much about the Bible, but..." and then he gives his opinion, which often actually contradicts the Word of God! Why doesn't he know much about the Bible? These things were written aforetime for our learning. God wants you to know His Word.

I began dividing life in absolutes... Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn't obey this black-and-white rule, when things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I built a barricade of delusions against it.

She was like his favorite candy - hard on the outside but a soft surprise on the inside.

It seems to me that maybe It pretty much always means, no