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The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.
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Jane Austen is the feminine Peter Pan of letters. She never grew up.
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I cannot consent to be led three or four hundred leagues out of my route, without its being by force of arms.
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The boundary between expert and amateur was an imposed social-cultural "protection" which actually exposed a number of women to a fatal disease, because decaying matter, as the fireman said of fire (cited in the book's final piece, "Torch Song") "ain't got no rules on it."
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So upright Quakers please both man and God.
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We do not rest satisfied with the present.... So imprudent we are that we wander in the times which are not ours and do not thinkof the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us.
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Spires whose "silent finger points to heaven."
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Living somewhere permanently, you have a stake in society. I had no stake. It did not matter to my life which way the war turned, and I think that gave a certain purity to the endeavor that I undertook. I see it as something positive, something that helps me conduct the kind of reporting that I wanted to do.
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There's power to: and everyone should have that, but everyone doesn't. Power to play Bach, or tennis, or boccie if you like. And there's power over; and no one should have that, but people do.
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Forgiveness is hard. Acceptance is doable.
