Marie

“The norms of fiction, the reader of Sleepless Nights might well conclude, are after all a constriction, or at least a superfluity: Since to live is to make fiction, what need to disguise the world as another, alternate one? At the same time strict reportage, with its prohibition against invention, imposes its own aesthetically intolerable demands. Sleepless Nights, an alchemical tour de force, reports by inventing and invents by reporting. It continues to remind us how the novel can become richer by permitting itself the resources of essay, journal, memoir, prose poem, chronicle. It is a commonplace that every book needs to find its own form, but how many do?”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“The most dangerous thing we can do with intelligence is to let it speak without being both chastised and informed by wisdom. For if we let it speak without the constraints and forbearance of wisdom, we will destroy ourselves. And in doing so, we will be so caught up in our ‘intelligence’ that we won’t even realize that it’s ‘us’ that’s killing ‘us.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“How dare the society calls itself civilized, while hailing women first as sexual objects, then as everything else! How dare a man foster the primitive courage to hit on every woman he encounters, as if she has been waiting her whole life to be hit on – as if to be hit on, is the purpose of her existence! Rise, my brothers, and see women as persons, and not as objects of sexual gratification. And if you are single, and truly would like to be with a woman you like, then be a gentleman and ask her out with respect, instead of treating her as an object to possess.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Constitution of The United Peoples of Earth

“Our [western] culture cuts us off from our natural roots, instead of contributing toward the cultivation of the natural beings we are. This tradition has, in this way, rendered us extraneous to our environment, extraneous to one another as living beings, en even extraneous to ourselves.”
― Luce Irigaray