Barbara

“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. It is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become victims of the darkness."

~”
― William O. Douglas

“Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.”
― Annie Dillard, An American Childhood: A Poignant Memoir About Parents and Passion in 1950s Pittsburgh

“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?”
― William O. Douglas

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke