Hogfather quote

thenightling:

This bit of dialogue has been butchered all over the Internet, including the Goodreads quotes page, and the important closing line is often chopped out to make it so much more cynical.   So here’s the conversation in its entirety.

From Hogfather by Terry Pratchett.  The conversation between Susan and her grandfather, Death.  Death’s dialogue is always in caps for those who are unfamiliar with the Discworld books. 

________________________ 

‘HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN.  TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.’
‘Tooth fairies?  Hogfathers?  Little -’
‘YES.  AS PRACTICE.  YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.’
‘So we can believe the big ones?’
‘YES.  JUSTICE.  MERCY.  DUTY.  THAT SORT OF THING.’

‘TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY.  AND YET  - Death waved a hand.  AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.’
‘Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point -’
‘MY POINT EXACTLY.’

‘YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE.  HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?’

_____________________________ 

Death’s point is you need to believe in them to make them real.   To chop this quote in half to make it look like he’s just saying that justice, mercy, and duty are lies destroys the entire meaning behind the conversation.     

junpier:

tea parties should be more common. let’s sit down and enjoy the afternoon with sum tea n lemon cookies. maybe wear pretty dresses or lovely suits or groovy overalls, yk? in the tea party, we r safe and loved. have a cookie.

queerpyracy:

queerpyracy:

queerpyracy:

i must once again criticize the girlbossification of mary shelley

just ran across someone very distressed to learn about the racism in frankenstein and this is what ignoring the orientalism of safie’s narrative and the casual mention that clerval wants to help the english colonize india in favor of a flattened narrative about mary shelley’s #feminism because she wrote a pivotal novel will get you!! it gets you people who forget that mary was an upper class english woman in the 19th century

since this has breached containment let me be extremely clear that i am not canceling long dead author mary shelley or her book which forms a fundamental cornerstone of my personality i am saying forcing historical figures into two dimensional Feminist Icon status is bad and leads people to have unrealistic ideas of those figures and their work. people who are grown ups can read work with problematique ideas without catching moral cooties

funnytwittertweets:

alexkablob:

breastforce:

It is… honestly depressing how any post on trans women will inevitably reach the point where somebody brings up terfs, at which point the reblogs become about terfs and how much they suck instead of whatever original thought the post was trying to express

#vocally hating terfs has become this staple of performative support of trans women and it’s genuinely harmful how pervasive it is #and when I say harmful I mean this is actively hurts trans women #it fucking sucks to try to have a conversation about our lives or experiences #only to have it turn into a conversation about a group of people who want us dead #it’s so much worse when it happens every fucking time

guy:

teathattast:

teathattast:

teathattast:

eXCUSE me who is this cat

the return of the Weibo cat

full emotional spectrum

biowareproblems:

My brain: You’ve played Dragon Age before. Try that new game you have instead.

Me:

kalesmash13:

omegaverse:

dirhwangdaseul-archived:

Astronomers baffled by black hole burping out spaghettified star years after eating it

Astronomers don't have an explanation for this, but they suspect it could be more common than once thought

livescience.com