Stevie

“You dare to contradict me? You who cannot light a single flame, or call one drop of water? Worst of my children, faded and broken, whom I cannot pay a husband to take. Since you were born, I pitied you and allowed you license, yet you grew disobedient and proud. Will you make me hate you more?”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I don’t know that this mode of teaching is applicable everywhere—I don’t know that we can in all subjects be comrades. But I think many of us who are teachers and professors have forgotten that the syllabus serves the student, and all around us are teachers, administrators, and columnists who seem to believe that material should be hard for the sake of it and that education itself is best when rendered not in wonder but in force. I have never formally issued a “trigger warning” or explicitly carved out a “safe space.” But I know that all readers do not come to a text equally. Some come surviving a rape, and some come caged in their assigned bodies, and some come having spent their entire young lives in classrooms with fellow students who made mascots of them. There seems to be an opportunity here, for comradeship, an invitation to allow for a more conversational literature, to revisit accepted ideas of voice and authority, to recognize that students are humans to be challenged, not animals to be broken and tamed.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Had she really thought I would not know him? I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles