Kae Tempest Quotes

Empathy is remembering that everybody has a story. Multiple stories. And remembering to make space to hear someone else’s story before immediately telling your own.

If you allow approval to define you, you will have no choice but to allow disapproval to define you when it comes.

We are empathic beings who feel for each other. Our very success as a species is rooted in our ability to be aware of each other's needs, to notice each other's pain and to experience deeply felt physiological and emotional empathy.

For words to have meaning, they have to be read.

When I am numb, how can I make myself connected? I can't. But I can try to create an environment that is welcoming for connection if it should turn up.

The way we have decided to live on this planet is sinister and strange.

I didn’t have a clue what it meant but I’ve been dizzy on that feeling ever since.

Or, more simply, creativity is any act of love. Any act of making. It is usually applied to art-making, but it can also be applied to anything you do that requires your focus, skill and ingenuity. It takes creativity to dress well, for example. To parent. To paint a windowsill. To give someone you love your full attention.

The work that I do on myself may not be evident in my daily exchanges, but little by little, if I continue, I hope that my actions will reflect my changing mindset, and next time, I promise myself, I'll do things differently. Getting on top of my shortcomings is not immediate; it's endless.

Words on a page are incomplete. The poem, the novel or the non-fiction pamphlet are finished when they are taken up and engaged with. Connection is collaborative. For words to have meaning, they have to be read.

How can I trust what anybody else stands for if I don’t know what I myself am about?

Maintaining a surface engagement with whatever is going on while at the same time being entirely elsewhere. So consumed with the concerns of the day, the actual events of the day pass unnoticed

If we give as much as we expect to take from a novel, a poem, an image or an album (or a conversation, or a relationship), it has a greater chance of becoming profound. As readers, we feel this happen when something speaks directly to our experience and we feel the words burning themselves into us...You may forget the exact words, but you carry a relationship with the text through your life. You may think this was entirely because of the quality of the text, but it was also about the quality of your reading.

I have sought numbness. Over many years I have thrown myself fully into the pursuit of getting numb.

Others who see the beauty first and are driven to witness the carnage. Others who see the carnage first and are driven to witness the beauty.

Ideas are such perfect things. But as soon as they're made real they're cringing, clunky, turgid things, so difficult to wield.

But now there is a loneliness so deep it sends me foetal

you hold your desire to please people or avoid confrontation in higher regard than your morals?

. Binge watch. Binge drink. Binge eat. Oblivion. I know this numbness because it is my life.

Next time I’m about to cast a harsh judgement on a stranger who offends me, can I allow myself instead to see them as the flawed and complex human that they are? Full of heartbreak, loss, ambition and disappointment, walking a volatile path of all the things they’ve ever failed at?

How many yous have you been? How many, Lined up inside, Each killing the last?

If you're not fighting for it, you don't want it.

The pain of having fucked things up so bad will never leave us.

Others who see the carnage first and are driven to witness the beauty.

I need the roar of a sound system or the carved emotion of a Rodin sculpture or Kool FM tape packs while I pull up the carpet or chisel tiles off the wall. I need creativity.

To be in a position of being able to ignore the reality of what this system does and continues to do is to be wholly complicit in it. Is to benefit hugely from it. To be able to not think about how the winners in this game came by their vast stores of mineral wealth is to profit from that wealth. The long list of ransacked nations, installed dictators, insurgencies financed by corporate interests, jailed bodies, ruined land. Death, disease and pipelines. To be able to ignore the inequality in your own city is to prosper from that inequality.

But one day, he'll be hunch-backed, riddled with pain; Desperate for love but too weak to enjoy it. Mumbling at strangers on trains, 'how strange that when we have youth we're so keen to destroy it.

I move like the boys, I talk like the boys, but my words are my own.

It's so much easier to know what's best than to do what's best. - Choices

On a plinth in the centre of a glass display case, in between large photographic journals and leather-bound antiques, I saw Jung’s Red Book. It was about a foot high, lit from beneath, and open at the first pages. I read those pages and felt my breathing change; something in the language was calling to me. I had been feeling so out of sorts and close to the edge. I didn’t want to get up and do a reading in a bookstore and answer questions about my novel. I just wanted to sit in the park and talk to my friend until it was time to fly to the next place. But seeing that book and reading that page, I felt myself rediscovered. Speak then of sick delusion when the spirit of the depths can no longer stay down and forces a man to speak in tongues instead of in human speech, and makes him believe that he himself is the spirit of the depths. But also speak of sick delusion when the spirit of this time does not leave a man and forces him to see only the surface, to deny the spirit of the depths and to take himself for the spirit of the times. The spirit of this time is ungodly, the spirit of the depths is ungodly, balance is godly.