Diane

“...Tell it, I pray thee.
And let me cow'ring stand, and be my touch
The valley's ice: there is a pleasure in it.
Yea, when the cold blood shoots through every vein;
When every pore upon my shrunken skin
A knotted knoll becomes, and to mine ears
Strange inward sounds awake, and to mine eyes
Rush stranger tears, there is a joy in fear.”
― Joanna Baillie, Orra

“There was the human body, which was so clearly designed to want babies--and then there was the human mind, which was so confused about the matter. Sometimes the mind didn't want the babies, but sometimes the mind was so perverse that it made other people have babies they knew they didn't want. For whom was this insisting done? Dr. Larch wondered. For whom did some minds insist that babies, even clearly unwanted ones, must be brought, screaming, into the world?”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“The student newspaper contains a lot more humor, though most of it is unintentional. Except for the front page (campus news) and the back page (sports), the campus rag contains little but letters to the editor, which I scan first for allusions to myself and next for unusual content, which in the current climate is any subject other than the unholy trinity of insensitivity, sexism, and bigotry, which the self-righteous, though not always literate, letter writers want their readers to know they're against. As a group they seem to believe that high moral indignation offsets and indeed outweighs all deficiencies of punctuation, spelling, grammar, logic, and style. In support of this notion there's only the entire culture.”
― Richard Russo, Straight Man

“Failure thus to examine ourselves limits the long-term effectiveness of response, and brackets us with the mentality of the fanatic who, literally, never seeks to recover, indeed is incapable of recovering, a long-since receded moment of doubt, the zone of possible choices, the potential of the routes not taken.”
― Wole Soyinka, Climate of Fear: The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World