Francesca Bentley

“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”
― Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic

“Here is Lady Winchilsea, for example, (...) She was born in the year 1661; she was noble by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women. (...) The human race is split up for her into two parties. Men are the 'opposing faction'; men are hated and feared, because they have the power to bar her way to what she wants to do - which is to write.

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,
Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed,
The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.
They tell us we mistake our sex and way;
Good breeding, fshion, dancing, dressing, play,
Are the accomplishments we should desire;
To write, or read, or think, or to inquire,
Would cloud our beauty , and exhaust our time,
And interrupt the conquests of our prime,
Whilst the dull manage of a servile house
Is held by some our utmost art and use. (...)

A Room of One's Own Chapter 4”
― Virginia Woolf

“What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls