Peter Schmidt

“Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark,” Baldwin said in an interview in 1961. “Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.”
― Azar Nafisi, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

“And for the soul if it is to know itself it is into a soul that it must look”
― Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lords and Commons: Poems

“illustrations of anthropomorphic piles of resin with dialogue bubbles above them: “Hello there, I’m Frankincense. Well, technically I’m Frankincense’s monster, but everyone gets that wrong.” One”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“Mrs Whatsit was surely no longer a Mrs Whatsit. She was a marble-white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen. No, she thought, it’s not like a Greek centaur. Not in the least. From the shoulders slowly a pair of wings unfolded, wings made of rainbows, of light upon water,”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time