Miriam

“I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them.”
― Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

“Some portion of Woolf’s genius, it seems to me, is that having no notion, that negative capability. I once heard about a botanist in Hawaii with a knack for finding new species by getting lost in the jungle, by going beyond what he knew and how he knew, by letting experience be larger than his knowledge, by choosing reality rather than the plan. Woolf not only utilized but celebrated the unpredictable meander, on mind and foot. Her great essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,”from 1930, has the light breezy tone of many of her early essays, and yet voyages deep into the dark.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

“This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves