Jennifer Peña

“I hope your bacon burns.”
― Diana Wynne Jones , Howl's Moving Castle

“willow trees, willow trees they remind me of Desdemona
I'm so damned literary
and at the same time the waters rushing past remind
me of nothing”
― Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems

“Leaf! you are so big!
How can you change your
color, then just fall!

As if there were no
such thing as integrity!”
― Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems

“The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader