Elaine

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Book cover for The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom
neither Buddhism nor shamanism are “revealed” teachings. Both emphasize direct experience and personal realization over doctrine.
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Washington Irving
“There is a sacredness in tears....They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.”
Washington Irving

Jessica Stern
“I often feel like nobody," Skip says. "I ask myself: Why would you want to talk to me? Why would anyone want to talk to me? It comes on me suddenly, this feeling that I'm not anything...a person who has spent a lot of time in bed, who doesn't want to be anything."

I know what he is talking about, and this time, I tell him that. For years, I could not understand why anyone took me seriously. I could not understand how I managed to get into MIT or Harvard, why anyone would offer me a postdoctoral fellowship or a job. I could not understand why people kept turning to me after September 11. I didn't see myself as a person who couldn't get out of bed, but as a salesgirl in a coffee shop - the job I had as a teenager who was afraid to apply to college. My identity was stuck there for year.

"Inside me there is the person who wants to be dead," he says. "I can't advocate for myself. I can advocate very strongly for others, but not for myself...Sometimes I'm not sure that I exist. Is this really me - this person whom people want to consult about clergy sexual abuse? Or am I really the person who can't get out of bed? I've gotten better - I spend more of my time living in the present. But it takes a lot of effort to stay in the present - a lot of yoga and meditation.”
Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

Andrea Dworkin
“Becoming a man requires that the boys learn to be indifferent to the fate of women. Indifference requires that the boy learn experience women as objects. The poet, the mystic, the prophet, the so-called sensitive man of any stripe, will still hear the wind whisper and the trees cry. But to him, women will be mute. He will have learned to be deaf to the sounds, sighs, whispers, screams of women in order to ally himself with other men in the hope that they will not treat him as child, that is, as one who belongs with the women.”
Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

Jessica Stern
“Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.”
Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

Daniel Defoe
“The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.”
Daniel Defoe

137136 House of LitnLife archived — 62 members — last activity Jul 04, 2020 08:29PM
LITnLIFE IS NO LONGER ACTIVE. WE CEASED MEETING AFTER NINE ACTIVE YEARS. LitnLife (LAL) is a small community devoted to chapter-by-chapter reading an ...more
59543 21st Century Literature — 3538 members — last activity 1 hour, 45 min ago
We read literary fiction from 2000 to present, with the intent of finding those literary gems of timeless and enduring quality. We're less focused o ...more
205584 European Literature in Translation — 171 members — last activity Jun 11, 2025 11:08AM
This group explores European literature in translation (i.e. it generally excludes works originally written in English, but we are bound to wander at ...more
164334 Read Women — 5730 members — last activity 1 hour, 24 min ago
A group for readers of all genders to discover and share their passion for books by women authors. We enjoy monthly book discussions, challenges, budd ...more
143776 Women's Classic Literature Enthusiasts — 1019 members — last activity Feb 06, 2026 04:09PM
This is a group for anyone interested in reading classical literature written by women.
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