It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.
Zora Neale HurstonRead
People can be slave-ships in shoes.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that people can be imprisoned by societal expectations while appearing free.
Zora Neale Hurston's quote highlights the metaphorical bondage that individuals can experience, even when they are outwardly living in a society that claims to value freedom. The 'slave-ships in shoes' imagery implies that people may carry the weight of their struggles and limitations, trapped by cultural norms and economic structures that dictate their lives, thus hindering their true potential and freedoms.
In practice
During a discussion on social justice, one could use this quote to illustrate the hidden struggles individuals face.
It seems that fighting is a game where everybody is the loser.
Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.
From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloomβ¦It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.
Don't you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday.
Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves.
In some ways, I am grateful that I was raised in a secular home, because that meant that I didn't have any old religious baggage to carry with me. I was free to go and think what I wanted.
My spiritual pain is unbearable. I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people's lives, then can it be that I a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?
A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.
I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it's a nice way to neutralize that polarization.
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