Ketutar Jensen

“If there were not thousands who still conceive that the sun and moon were created and are kept going for no other purpose than to lighten the darkness of our little planet; if only the other day a grave gentleman had not written a perfectly serious essay to show that the world is a flat plain, one would scarcely believe that there could still be people who doubt that ancient Egyptian is now read and translated as fluently as ancient Greek. Yet an Englishman whom I met in Egypt — an Englishman who had long been resident in Cairo, and who was well acquainted with the great Egyptologists who are attached to the service of the khedive — assured me of his profound disbelief in the discovery of Champollion. "In my opinion," said he, "not one of these gentlemen can read a line of hieroglyphics.”
― Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile

“I knew as a 10-year-old Black girl that I was not precious to these adults. I believed they would kill me as readily as they would kill the Viet Cong the US was at war with. It didn't matter that I was a United States citizen. It didn't matter that I was very smart, would probably grow up to be pretty like my mother, or that I was fun to talk to and had unlimited potential. It didn't matter that I was a good girl and hadn't been suspended from school. It didn't matter because I didn't matter to them.”
― Mae Jemison, Find Where the Wind Goes: Moments From My Life

“Now all the candles were lit, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Lewis! Stop throwing stones! I don't believe you've listened to a single word I've been saying!"
"Yes, I have. You were talking about jugs. I'm listening. I'm listening to you and a dozen other things as well."
"There aren't a dozen other things. There's only the chapel bell, and some men shouting in the boats down on the quay... and a dog barking, and some ducks in the garden below."
"Not bad! You've missed about fifty larks in the sky, and the grasshoppers all round us, and a car changing gear on the hill, and the oars in the rowlocks of that boat putting out, and the children playing, and the goat bells away on the hill behind us, and I think I can hear a smity."
"What a babel it sounds! I'd have said it was a quiet evening."
"So it is. It's so quiet that you can hear every sound in it.”
― Margaret Kennedy, The Constant Nymph