ronnie

“Imaginary Africa was a cornucopia of imponderables that like the monstrous Grendel in Beowulf resisted explanation. Thus, a plethora of incompatible metaphors can be gleaned from the literature. As the original locus of the human race, Africa is ancient, yet, being under colonial control, it is also infantile. A kind of old fetus always waiting to be born but confounding all midwives. In novel after novel, short story after short story, Africa is simultaneously innocent and corrupting, savage and pure, irrational and wise.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own: for instance "I can't possibly teach Black women's writing- their experience is so different from mine," yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another: "She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?" Or, "she's a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?" Or again, "This woman writes of her sons and I have no children." And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“And he'll supplant a man, supplant him - take his place as if he was nothing but an old rag, and never stop to think that a man's not an old rag. Oh lord, oh dear! What a misfortune...!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double

“We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive luster to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artefact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity. Of course this 'sheen of antiquity' of which we hear so much is in fact the glow of grime. In both Chinese and Japanese the words denoting this glow describe a polish that comes of being touched over and over again, a sheen produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of handling - which is to say grime. If indeed 'elegance is frigid', it can as well be described as filthy.”
― Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows and Other Essays