Tré

“Pork, of course, was off the menu – not because it harboured potentially deadly bacteria, as is often supposed, but because the pig tended to be regarded as a dangerously liminal animal. With the feet of a cud-eater, the diet of a scavenger, the habits of a dirt-dweller and the cunning of a human, it exhibited an unsettling combination of characteristics, rendering it culturally inedible for some (but not all) southern Levantine peoples, for whom pigs were often associated with the underworld or malevolent supernatural powers.”
― Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy

“How could I not be distracted? Here was a deity just like those I’d visited in museums as a child—a god of ancient myths, fantastic stories and long-lost rituals; a god from the distant past, from a society utterly unlike our own. Those were the terms on which I wanted to encounter him; not as a distant and abstract being, but as the product of a particular culture, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then; a god shaped by their own physical circumstances, their own view of the world—and their own imaginations. Sitting in that lecture hall, it seemed to me that this potent figure had somehow been theorized away and replaced by the abstract being with whom we are more familiar today (…).”
― Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy

“Holding me in his arms, the way that poems hold clauses.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“The New World slave societies differed from this situation only in degree. In the French slave colony of Saint Domingue during the second half of the eighteenth century, when hostility to the freedmen was especially strong, a book that had the official blessing of the French government declared, “Interest and security demand that we overwhelm the black race with so much disdain that whoever descends from it until the sixth generation shall be covered by an indelible stain.”29”
― Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface