Susie

“They looked like the people you see on the six o’clock news—refugees, sent to wait in some strange ugly place, with all their boxes and sacks around them. It suddenly occurred to me that this was just the way it must have been for the real Holy Family, stuck away in a barn by people who didn’t much care what happened to them. They couldn’t have been very neat and tidy either, but more like this Mary and Joseph”
― Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

“I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection.”
― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“the fact that so many women writers are drawn to fairy-tale material is also part of a long and honorable historic tradition: folk tales and magical tales (like other largely anonymous arts) have long been associated with women. As Alison Lurie has pointed out (in her essay “Once Upon a Time”): “Throughout Europe (except in Ireland), the storytellers from whom the Grimm Brothers and their followers collected their material were most often women; in some areas they were all women. For hundreds of years, while written literature was almost exclusively the province of men, these tales were being invented and passed on orally by women.” For centuries, fairy tales have been the voice of disenfranchised populations: not only women, but also the old, the poor, and social outcasts (such as the Gypsies—famed throughout the world for their wealth of magical tales). Fairy tales speak covertly, symbolically, about the hard realities of life; and these symbols are proving as potent to artists today as in centuries past.”
― Ellen Datlow, Silver Birch, Blood Moon

“a feat which is not unlike tryin’ to hold a large beach ball under water while doin’ needlepoint,”
― Robert Lynn Asprin, M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link