In a culture where female dissatisfaction and anger were linked with witchcraft, and where women were pressured to search their consciences for evidence of their own evil, not surprisingly some women were persuaded—albeit temporarily—that
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“Witchcraft is similar to the risk of nuclear war, of global warming, or, perhaps most aptly, of contemporary terrorism: they all constitute an overriding but indeterminable threat, a threat that is both real and yet often absents itself from daily experience.”
― The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island
― The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island
“I touched the loose peg gently, running my hands over the warm wood of the lute. The varnish was scraped and scuffed in places. It had been treated unkindly in the past, but that didn’t make it less lovely underneath. So yes. It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.”
― The Wise Man's Fear
― The Wise Man's Fear
“It’s pricey to get here and expensive as hell to live here. But a city can’t just be rich tourists and eccentric billionaires. It needs working-class people too. You don’t expect J. Worthalot Richbastard III to clean his own toilet, do you?”
― Artemis
― Artemis
“To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.”
― Little Fires Everywhere
― Little Fires Everywhere
“In 1654, for example, Elizabeth Drew was whipped twelve stripes (a punishment comparable to that for rape of a single woman) for naming her master’s son as the father of her child. When Drew persisted in her story she was whipped an additional twenty stripes and forced to stand in public on lecture day with a paper on her forehead proclaiming herself “A SLANDERER OF MR ZEROBABELL ENDICOTT.”
― The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England
― The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England
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