Bio

 I’m a critically-thinking, passionate, empathetic, imaginative, industrious, bilingual, knowledge-hungry, book-loving, philosophy-consuming, business-savvy, English Graduate Student at California University, Northridge, with a disciplinary focus on Rhetoric & Composition. I have my BA in Honors English from California University, Northridge and will have my MA in English in Spring 2015.

A FEW OF MY FAVORITE QUOTES:

Socrates:

This moment is the only thing that matters.

Socrates:
I call myself a Peaceful Warrior… because the battles we fight are on the inside

Socrates:
There is no starting or stopping–only doing.

Socrates:
A warrior does not give up what he loves, he finds the love in what he does.

Socrates:
Everything has a purpose, even this, and it’s up to you to find it.

Socrates:
Everyone wants to tell you what to do and what’s good for you. They don’t want you to find your own answers, they want you to believe theirs.

Dan Millman:
Let me guess, and you want me to believe yours.

S: No, I want you to stop gathering information from the outside and start gathering it from the inside.
P: Life has just three rules?
S: And you already know them…
P: Paradox, Humor, and Change.
S: Paradox…?
P: Life is a mystery. Don’t waste time trying to figure it out.
S: Humor…?
P: Keep a sense of humor, especially about yourself. It is a strength beyond all measure.
S: Change…?
P: Know that nothing stays the same.

—_The Peaceful Warrior_

 

“Caught without a class, a structure or tradition to support me, in a sense, the choice to take a different path is made for me. The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions, classes, make them mine, me theirs.”

-Barack Obama, 1983

 

“There is an old saying to the effect that King Midas for a long time hunted the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, in the forests, without catching him. When Silenus finally fell into the king’s hands, the king asked what was the best thing of all for men, the very finest. The daemon remained silent, motionless and inflexible, until, compelled by the king, he finally broke out into shrill laughter and said, ‘Suffering creature, born for a day, child of accident and toil, why are you forcing me to say what is the most unpleasant thing for you to hear? The very best thing for you is totally unreachable: not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing. The second best thing for you, however, is this: to die soon.’…
…In order to be able to live, the Greeks must have created these gods out of the deepest necessity. We can readily imagine the sequential development of these gods: through that instinctive Apollonian drive for beauty there developed by slow degrees out of the primordial titanic divine order of terror the Olympian divine order of joy, just as roses break forth out of thorny bushes. How else could a people so emotionally sensitive, so spontaneously desiring, so singularly capable of suffering have endured their existence, unless the same qualities manifested themselves in their gods, around whom flowed a higher glory. The same instinctual drivehich summons art into life as the seductive replenishment for further living and the completion of existence also gave rise to the Olympian world, by which the Hellenic “Will” held before itself a transfiguring mirror…
…In this way the gods justify the lives of men because they themselves live it—that is the only satisfactory theodicy!
…Existence under the bright sunshine of such gods is experienced as worth striving for in itself, and the essential pain of the Homeric men consists in the separation from that sunlight, above all in the fact that such separation is close at hand, so that we could say of them, with a reversal of the wisdom of Silenus, ‘the very worst thing for them was to die soon, the second worst was to die at all…’
…When the laments resound now, they tell of short−lived Achilles, of the changes in the race of men, transformed like leaves, of the destruction of the heroic age. It is not unworthy of the greatest heroes to long to live on, even as a day labourer….
…In the Apollonian stage, the “Will” so spontaneously demands to live on, the Homeric man fills himself with that feeling so much, that even his lament becomes a song of praise.”

–F.N., B.O.T.

 

“What you have to understand about my people is that they are a noble people. Humility is their form of pride. It is their strength; it is their weakness. And, If you can humble yourself before them, they will do anything you ask.”

-Frank Underwood

 

“And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.”

-Joseph Conrad, H.O.D.

 

“My friend, Thomas Jefferson is an American saint because he wrote the words ‘All men are created equal’, words he clearly didn’t believe since he allowed his own children to live in slavery. He’s a rich white snob who’s sick of paying taxes to the Brits. So, yeah, he writes some lovely words and aroused the rabble and they went and died for those words while he sat back and drank his wine and fucked his slave girl. This guy wants to tell me we’re living in a community? Don’t make me laugh. I’m living in America, and in America you’re on your own. America’s not a country. It’s just a business. Now fuckin’ pay me.”

-Jackie Cogan

 

“And you—sorority girl—yeah—just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day, there are some things you should know, and one of them is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies…

None of this is the fault of a 20-year-old college student, but you, nonetheless, are without a doubt, a member of the WORST-period-GENERATION-period-EVER-period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about? Yosemite?

….We sure used to be. We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn’t belittle it; it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy…

And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one; America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.”

-Will McAvoy, The Newsroom

 

“There are two kinds of pain. The sort of pain that makes you strong. Or useless pain. The sort of pain that’s only suffering. I have no patience for useless things. Moments like this require someone who will act. To do the unpleasant thing. The necessary thing… There, no more pain.”

-Frank Underwood

 

“It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life.”

-S

 

“A prince must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.”

-N.M.

 

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

-Maya Angelou

 

“In liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity. Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation”

-Zizek, “Violence”

 

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

-Henry David Thoreau

 

Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves – or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.

-Ayn Rand

 

Fear is the mother of morality.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

 

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

-Blade Runner

 

Improvise, Adapt, Darwin, I Ching. Shit Happens. Whatever man. Roll with it.

-Collateral

 

“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”

-David Foster Wallace

 

For someone who was never meant for this world, I must confess I’m suddenly having a hard time leaving it. Of course, they say every atom in our bodies was once part of a star. Maybe I’m not leaving… maybe I’m going home.

-Vincent from “Gattaca”

 

“math is not allowed in hell”

–Rory Dolan on the Prince of Darkness

 

“After all, Facebook, like Zuckerberg, is a paradox: a Web site that celebrates the aura of intimacy while providing the relief of distance, substituting bodiless sharing and the thrills of self-created celebrityhood for close encounters of the first kind. Karl Marx suggested that, in the capitalist age, we began to treat one another as commodities. “The Social Network” suggests that we now treat one another as packets of information.”

–The New Yorker, David Denby