Catherine Bishop

“When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. 'This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar' she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. ‘My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’ It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions?”
― Sandi Toksvig

“I’ve found myself leaving an event or a party paralysed with fear because of something that I’ve said, and spent the next couple of days worrying about what people would think of me. Of course, in reality, the hundred or so people who were at the event didn’t spend the hour after I left the party talking about me. Despite what I might believe, I am not the planet around which everyone else orbits.”
― Susan Calman, Cheer Up, Love: Adventures in Depression with the Crab of Hate

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.”
― Nora Ephron

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street”
― W.H. Auden