Jennine Avery

“So how did he imagine we would have known anything about them?’ Her husband asked.
Gloria smiled awkwardly. ‘They woke up this morning and have been chanting you name ever since.”
― A.R. Merrydew, The Girl with the Porcelain Lips

“One does not know yet whether Christ was
God or the Devil -
Buddha is more reassuring.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Reality Sandwiches

“Witches the Church simply burned at the stake, but something more interesting happened to the witches’ magic plants. The plants were too precious to banish from human society, so in the decades after Pope Innocent’s fiat against witchcraft, cannabis, opium, belladonna, and the rest were simply transferred from the realm of sorcery to medicine, thanks largely to the work of a sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician named Paracelsus. Sometimes called the “Father of Medicine,” Paracelsus established a legitimate pharmacology largely on the basis of the ingredients found in flying ointments. (Among his many accomplishments was the invention of laudanum, the tincture of opium that was perhaps the most important drug in the pharmacopoeia until the twentieth century.) Paracelsus often said that he had learned everything he knew about medicine from the sorceresses. Working under the rational sign of Apollo, he domesticated their forbidden Dionysian knowledge, turning the pagan potions into healing tinctures, bottling the magic plants and calling them medicines.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

“My mother was always trying to think up plans for what she would do if the Taliban came. She thought of sleeping with a knife under her pillow. I said I could sneak into the toilet and call the police. My brothers and I thought of digging a tunnel. Once again I prayed for a magic wand to make the Taliban disappear.”
― Malala Yousafzai, I am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban