Sreyanth

“Once, men and women were able to turn themselves into eagles and fly immense distances. They communed with rivers and mountains and received wisdom from them. They felt the turning of the stars inside their own minds. My contemporaries did not understand this. They were all enamoured with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old. As if merit was a function of chronology! But it seemed to me that the wisdom of the ancients could not have simply vanished. Nothing simply vanishes. It’s not actually possible.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women;
those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are
poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an
academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For
the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us
temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about
genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the
master's house as their only source of support.”
― Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

“…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety
of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the
Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and
which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so
fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the
Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are
Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is
no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”
― George Luis Borges

“For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive,
and it is within that knowledge that our real power I rediscovered”
― Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House