kate

“I had feelings: passive as I lived, little as I spoke, cold as I looked, when I thought of past days, I could feel. About the present, it was better to be stoical; about the future – such a future as mine – to be dead. And in catalepsy and a dead trance, I studiously held the quick of my nature.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

“Literature was life, and reading became an open door to a world beyond the familiar.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“I am a woman committed to
a politics
of transliteration, the methodology

of a mind
stunned at the suddenly
possible shifts of meaning - for which
like amnesiacs

in a ward on fire, we must
find words
or burn.”
― Olga Broumas, Beginning with O

“My greatest pleasure was the enjoyment of a serene sky amidst these verdant woods: yet I loved all the changes of Nature; and rain, and storm, and the beautiful clouds of heaven brought their delights with them. When rocked by the waves of the lake my spirits rose in triumph as a horseman feels with pride the motions of his high fed steed.
But my pleasures arose from the contemplation of nature alone, I had no companion: my warm affections finding no return from any other human heart were forced to run waste on inanimate objects.”
― Mary Shelley, Mathilda