A Selection of Quotes that I've Enjoyed Recently

"Our correspondences show us where our intimacies lie.  There is something very sensual about a letter.  The physical contact of pen to paper, the time set aside to focus thoughts, the folding of the paper into the envelope, licking it closed, addressing it, a chosen stamp, and then the release of the letter to the mailbox - are all acts of the tenderness.  

And it doesn't stop there.  Our correspondences have wings - paper birds that fly from my house to yours - flocks of ideas crisscrossing the country.  Once opened, a connection is made.  We are not alone in the world."

Terry Tempest Williams

Refuge

Pg. 84

"Love is an infinite feeling in a finite container, and so upsets the intellect, frustrates the will.  An anarchic emotion that transcends rules of age, race, blood, passionate love has a wild philosophy at base.  Because we can't control the fixation of love and desire, we experience emotional mayhem - stories, fiction, works of art result."

Louise Erdrich

The Blue Jay's Dance

Pg. 106

"Hypothetical Pierogies

They were the best thing she ever made, the dish she was known for, the food of the gods, the manna, the festive occasion's one missing element.  I hunger for these pierogies with a human hunger for the unattainable, for it is true that although she was famous for her pierogies, my grandmother made them only once.  I was eight years old, attaining the age of reason, subject to wrathful appetites.  I encountered melting dough, smoky onions, sour cheese filling, edges browned in lard.  Rotund pierogies filled me with a desire that would never be gratified."

Louise Erdrich

The Blue Jay's Dance

Pg. 201-202

"Books, for me, are a home.  Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside.  Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.  

There is a warmth there too - a hearth.  I sit down with a book and I am warm."

Jeanette Winterson

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Pg. 61

"But that was the point.  Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value.  The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there.  That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating.  The wider we read the freer we become.  Emily Dickinson barely left her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, but when we read, 'My life stood - a loaded gun' we know we have met an imagination that will detonate life, not decorate it.

So I read on.  And I read on, past my own geography and history, past the foundling stories and the Nori brickworks, past the Devil and the wrong crib.  The great writers were not remote;  they were in Accrington."

Jeanette Winterson

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Pg. 117

"But in spite of its sexism, snobbery, patriarchal attitudes and indifference to student welfare, the great thing about Oxford was its seriousness of purpose and the unquestioned belief that the life of the mind was at the heart of civilised life."

Jeanette Winterson

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Pg. 143

"The more I read the more I fought against the assumption that literature is for the minority - of a particular education or class.  Books were my birthright too.  I will not forget my excitement at discovering that the earliest recorded poem in the English language was composed by a herdsman in Whitby around AD 680 ('Caedmon's Hymn') when St. Hilda was the abbess of Whitby Abbey.  

Imagine it...a woman in charge and an illiterate cowhand making a poem of such great beauty that educated monks wrote it down and told it to visitors and pilgrims."

Jeanette Winterson

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Pg. 143