Vanessa Pefferman

“I could scarcely summon courage to rise. But even those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized.”
― Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself

“At eighteen, in a dream, he saw himself plodding through jungles, chinning up the ledges of cliffs, wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams. The peculiar thing about Everett Ruess was that he went out and did the things he dreamed about, not simply for a two-weeks’ vacation in the civilized and trimmed wonderlands, but for months and years in the very midst of wonder...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Jesus said take up your cross and follow Me, but He didn't ast us to go out and nail ourselves to a board.”
― Olive Ann Burns

“Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages