Lin

“As a child I read hoping to learn everything, so I could be like my father. I hoped to combine my father's grasp of information and reasoning with my mother's will and vitality. But the books were leading me away. They would propel me right out of Pittsburgh altogether, so I could fashion a life among books somewhere else. So the Midwest nourishes us . . . and presents us with the spectacle of a land and a people completed and certain. And so we run to our bedrooms and read in a fever, and love the big hardwood trees outside the windows, and the terrible Midwest summers, and the terrible Midwest winters, and the forested river valleys, with the blue Appalachian Mountains to the east of us and the broad great plains to the west. And so we leave it sorrowfully, having grown strong and restless by opposing with all our will and mind and muscle its simple, loving, single will for us: that we stay, that we stay and find a place among its familiar possibilities.”
― Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.”
― Muriel Rukeyser

“If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.”
― Muriel Rukeyser

“In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred. It is a prayer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present.”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, The Shapeshifters: The Kiesha'ra of the Den of Shadows