Cathleen > Recent Status Updates

“Conversation is the vehicle for change. We test our ideas. We hear our own voice in concert with another. And inside those pauses of listening, we approach new territories of thought. A good argument, call it a discussion, frees us. Words fly out of our mouths like threatened birds. Once released, they may never return. If they do, they have chosen a home and the bird-words are calmed into an ars poetica.”

“To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters.”

“I don’t believe our fears ever leave us completely.” — in reference to her fear of public speaking related to a lisp she had as a child

“The ocean as mother is mesmerizing in her power, a creative force that can both comfort and destroy.”

“It is here I must have fallen in love with water, recognizing its power and sublimity, where I learned to trust that what I love can kill me, knock me down, and threaten to drown me with its unexpected wave. If so, then it was also here where I came to know I can survive what hurts. I believed in my capacity to stand back up and run into the waves again and again, no matter the risk.”

“We all have our secrets. I hold mine. To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.”

“It is the province of mothers to preserve the myth that we are unburdened with our own problems.”

"The fact that one percent of the nation's richest individuals controls 42 percent of the country's wealth is a stunning revelation in the wake of a recession. But, through the lens of history, we see the institutionalized precedent of greed meticulously entangled in this nation's very fabric. In fact, one could argue that America was a corporation before it was a country."

Stop judging me. I've had a hard few weeks.

Quoting R.I. Moore's The Formation of a Persecuting Society: "Pollution fear… is the fear that the privileged feel of those at whose expense their privilege is enjoyed."

xix: "Entertainment in its broadest sense-- popular ballads, vaudeville, films, sculptures, plays, paintings, pornography, pulp novels --has not only been a primary mode of expression of LGBT identity, but one of the most effective means of social change. Ironically, the enormous political power of these forms was often understood by the people who wanted to ban them, not by the people who were simply enjoying them."

From the intro, p. xix: "many of the most important changes for LGBT people in the past five hundred years have been a result of war... wars have had an enormous impact on all Americans, but their effects on LGBT people have been particularly pronounced, in part because the social violence of war affects sexuality and gender."

"I remembered how, as a girl, I thought that I could not leave Agate Hill, that I could not leave my ghosts. Now I understood that love does not reside in places... love lives not in places nor even bodies but in the spaces between them, the long and lovely sweep of air and sky, and in the living heart and memory until that is gone too, and we are all of us wanderers, as we have always been, upon the earth."

"I felt as wide awake as I have ever been, looking all around my house which was not mine really, any more than it had ever been ours, any more than a person can lay claim to any place, for we are only passing through."

"In fact, old age has been something of a disappointment in that I fully expected wisdom to come to me sometime, certainly by now, perching like a robin on my shoulder."

"The things that people really want are the most like to kill them, it seems to me, such as war and babys."

"By 1968, New York's famed 'singles ghetto' had been renamed the 'girl ghetto.' And it's residents came under unkind, often vicious, scrutiny... No matter how lucky they might have felt, whatever it was they'd got away from, girls could never quite convey to male reporters just what it was they found so thrilling about their own interpretation of single life. That's because reporters did not want to know."

"Riot Grrrl, by encouraging girls to turn their anger outward, taught a crucial lesson: Always ask, Is there something wrong not with me but with the world at large? It also forced us to confront a second question: Once we've found our rage, where do we go from there?"

"How easy it is to idealize things that happened in the past, or are happening to somebody else as more enticing than what you could make out of your own life."

I didn't know it, but I'd been waiting for a book with this line: "she tore the old fairy tale a new asshole."

1902 female honorees of Who's Who: "53.3 percent of them -- for the time an enormous number -- said they would never marry, viewing it as a 'profound disincentive' to serious work... the notion of the best and the brightest refusing to marry and reproduce, preferring instead to conduct scientific research, attend conferences, smoke and/or chain themselves to fences, had taken hold."

"In 1910 there were an estimated fifteen thousand boarding and furnished rooming houses, where girls were not so much chaperoned but placed on a permanent parole... It seemed all apartment keys had been reserved for men. Until the early twentieth century there were no apartments for women. They didn't exist."

"The obvious fact was that no one could live on two dollars a week -- the typical salary -- or even on a generous raise to four dollars or, if she was very lucky, seven. In 1870 the Herald estimated that 5 to 10 percent of all young working women made extra money by hooking, treating it as an adjunct to their jobs."

"I relate this in the very manner in which things then appear'd to me, as far as I am able; but infinitely short of the lively impressions which they made on my Soul at that time; indeed those Impressions are not to be explain'd by words, or if they are I am not Mistress of Words enough to express them." This is starting to wear on me. I do like the sound of "Mistress of Words," though.

"I relate this in the very manner in which things then appear'd to me, as far as I am able; but infinitely short of the lively impressions which they made on my Soul at that time; indeed those Impressions are not to be explain'd by words, or if they are I am not Mistress of Words enough to express them." This is starting to wear on me. I do like the sound of "Mistress of Words," though.

Getting to page 30 in a book shouldn't require so much discipline. I hope this story picks up because I feel like throwing in the towel.