Many of her works addressed the dark side of human nature. “The Lottery” (1948)  is her best-known short story; standouts among her novels are The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. 

Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons  pioneered the genre of “momoirs” that inspired such writers as Erma Bombeck and Jean Kerr. In Jackson’s case, her own family life wasn’t quite as fun as the glossy and wry depictions in her pages. 

As a master of the psychological horror genre, Jackson influenced Stephen King and others. Having suffered from various ailments and addictions, she was only forty-eight when she died of heart failure. Even so, Jackson’s literary legacy has proven sturdy and enduring. 

. . . . . . . . . .

The Lottery (1948)

The Lottery and Other Stories 

“The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.”

. . . . . . . . .

The Road Through the Wall (1948)

The Road Through the Wall

“In ten years I will be a beautiful charming lovely lady writer without any husband or children but lots of lovers and everyone will read the books I write and want to marry me but I will never marry any of them. I will have lots of money and jewels too.”

. . . . . . . . .

“The weather falls more gently on some places than on others, the world looks down more paternally on some people. Some spots are proverbially warm, and keep, through falling snow, their untarnished reputations as summer resorts; some people are automatically above suspicion.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Outside were the eucalyptus trees, like lace against the sky. If it were only possible to lie against them, light and bodiless, sink into their softness, deeper and deeper, lost in them, buried, never come back again …”

. . . . . . . . . .

“We must expect to set a standard. Actually, however much we may want to find new friends whom we may value, people who are exciting to us because of new ideas, or because they are different, we have to do what is expected of us.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Hangsaman (1951)

Hangsaman

“Natalie Waite, who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen, lived in an odd corner of the world of sound and sight past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions. 

. . . . . . . . . . .

“The gap between the poetry she wrote and the poetry she contained was, for Natalie, something unsolvable.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Someday I will be sixty years old, sixty-seven, eighty, and, remembering, will perhaps recall that something of this sort happened once (where? when? who?) and will perhaps smile nostalgically thinking, What a sad silly girl I was, to be sure.’”

. . . . . . . . . . . .

“Imagine, always pretending to run a world. Always imitating the sort of people they think they might be if the world were the sort of world it isn’t. Pretending to be words like ‘normal’ and ‘wholesome’ and ‘honest’ and ‘decent’ and ‘self-respecting’ and all the rest, when even the words aren’t real. Imagine, being people.”

. . . . . . . . . . . .

  “‘Do you plan to be a writer?’
       A what? Natalie thought; a writer, a plumber, a doctor, a merchant, a chief; the best-laid plans of; a writer the way I might plan to be a corpse? ‘A writer?’ she repeated, as though she had never heard the word before.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

The Sundial (1958)

The Sundial

“The sight of one’s own heart is degrading; people are not meant to look inward–that’s why they’ve been give bodies, to hide their souls.”

. . . . . . . . . . . .

“The question of belief is a curious one, partaking of the wonders of childhood and the blind hopefulness of the very old; in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something. It might be suggested, and not easily disproven that anything, no matter how exotic, can be believed by someone. 

. . . . . . . . . . . .

“When shall we live if not now?”

. . . . . . . . . . . .

“Now, she thought; I may go mad, but at least I look like a lady.”

. . . . . . . . . . . .

“The experiment with humanity is at an end,” Aunt Fanny said.
        “Splendid,” Mrs. Halloran said, “I“was getting very tired of all of them.”

. . . . . . . . . .

The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

The Haunting of Hill House

“Hill House has an impressive list of tragedies connected with it, but then, most old houses have. People have to live and die somewhere, after all, and a house can hardly stand for eighty years without seeing some of its inhabitants die within its walls.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“When they were silent for a moment the quiet weight of the house pressed down from all around them.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“My dear, how can I make you perceive that there is no danger where there is nothing but love and understanding?”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Nothing is ever really wasted, she believed sensibly, even one’s childhood, and then each year, one summer morning, the warm wind would come down the city street where she walked and she would be touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by.”

. . . . . . . . . .

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle
. . . . . . . . . .

“What are you reading, my dear? A pretty sight, a lady with a book.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.” 

. . . . . . . . . .

“I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“I can’t help it when people are frightened … I always want to frighten them more.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Shirley Jackson’s novels on Bookshop.org*

. . . . . . . . . . .

Further reading about Shirley Jackson

• Shirley Jackson on Motherhood, Experience, and Fiction Writing
• Shirley Jackson: Mother of the Fictional and Real-Life Teen
• Six Novels by Shirley Jackson: Psychological Thrillers by a Master

*This is a Bookshop.org affiliate link. If a product is purchased after linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps us continue to grow.

The post Quotes from Shirley Jackson’s Psychological Thrillers appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

At one point in the 1930s, Mae was the highest-earning woman in the U.S. Constantly doing battle with censors, she famously said, “I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.” Mae created her iconic persona, and behind it was her desire to poke holes in stodgy convention and hypocrisy.

The American Film Institute named  her the 15th greatest female screen legend, an honor she richly deserved. When her film career wound down, she continued to write books and plays.

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“There are no good girls gone wrong — just bad girls found out.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I wrote the story myself. It’s about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Sex is like good bridge. If you don’t have a good partner, you’d better have a good hand.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better. ”

. . . . . . . . . . 

Mae West: The Surprisingly Literary Star of Stage & Screen

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I’m single because I was born that way.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I’m no model lady. A model’s just an imitation of the real thing.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Ladies who play with fire must remember that smoke gets in their eyes.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“A dame that knows the ropes isn’t likely to get tied up.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“It’s not the men in your life that matters, it’s the life in your men.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Discarded lovers should be given a second chance, but with somebody else.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Sex is an emotion in motion.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I never said it would be easy, I only said it would be worth it.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Cultivate your curves — they may be dangerous but they won’t be avoided.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“It is better to be looked over than overlooked.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Don’t keep a man guessing too long — he’s sure to find the answer somewhere else”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“You are never too old to become younger!”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Love thy neighbor — and if he happens to be tall, debonair and devastating, it will be that much easier.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Women like a man with a past, but they prefer a man with a present.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Look your best — who said love is blind? ”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“A woman in love can’t be reasonable — or she probably wouldn’t be in love.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“To err is human — but it feels divine.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I have found men who didn’t know how to kiss. I’ve always found time to teach them.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“If a little is great, and a lot is better, then way too much is just about right!”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Men are my hobby, if I ever got married I’d have to give it up.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Getting married is like trading in the adoration of many for the sarcasm of one.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“When women go wrong, men go right after them.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Good women are no fun … The only good woman I can recall in history was Betsy Ross. And all she ever made was a flag.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I’ve no time for broads who want to rule the world alone. Without men, who’d do up the zipper on the back of your dress? ”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I never loved another person the way I loved myself.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“JUDGE: Are you trying to show contempt for this court?
MAE WEST: I was doin’ my best to hide it.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Women with pasts interest men because they hope history will repeat itself.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I’m a woman of very few words, but lots of action.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“A man’s kiss is his signature.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Everyone has the right to run his own life — even if you’re heading for a crash. What I’m against is blind flying.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Love isn’t an emotion or an instinct — it’s an art.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I’ve been in more laps than a napkin.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I see you’re a man with ideals. I better be going before you’ve still got them.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“It isn’t what I do, but how I do it. It isn’t what I say, but how I say it, and how I look when I do it and say it.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I saw what a mess a lot of people could make of their lives when they’re smitten. Some of them go temporarily insane. They find a person who they think holds the key to their happiness — the only key to their happiness … My work has always been my greatest happiness.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“A hard man is good to find.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!” “Goodness had nothing to do with it.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Ten men waiting for me at the door? Send one of them home, I’m tired.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Men are all alike — except the one you’ve met who’s different.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is better.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“I only like two kinds of men, domestic and imported.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“What’s the good of resisting temptation? There’ll always be more.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Sex with love is the greatest thing in life. But sex without love — that’s not so bad either.”

. . . . . . . . . . 

“Gentlemen prefer blondes, but who says blondes prefer gentlemen?”

. . . . . . . . . . 

More about Mae West

• Mae West biography
• Mae West: Dirty Blonde (American Masters, PBS)
• IMDB
• The Best of Mae West (film clip compilation)

The post 65 Witty, Bawdy Mae West Quotes appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

In addition to her poetry, she was known for her short stories as well as her autobiography, My Story. Here we’ll explore quotes from My Story, a book  both widely admired as well as controversial.

Kamala Das (later known as Kamala Surayya) believed in living life on her own terms, and this reveals itself in her writings. Her confessional poetry style wasn’t one readily adopted by Indian poets, least of all women. Her English poetry has been compared to that of Anne Sexton’s and won her recognition and literary awards during her lifetime.

Her writings look at Indian society with a critical eye, questioning its intransigent patriarchy and deeply entrenched notions of how women are expected to behave. Where love is concerned, there is a yearning for romanticism, which ends in cynicism. A quest for the spiritual is also visible in her writings, especially her poetry.

In the Preface to My Story, Kamala Das wrote:

“Some people told me that writing an autobiography like this, with absolute honesty, keeping nothing to oneself, is like doing a striptease. True, maybe. I, will, firstly, strip myself of clothes and ornaments. Then I intend to peel off this light brown skin and shatter my bones. At last, I hope you will be able to see my homeless, orphan, intensely beautiful soul, deep within the bone, deep down under, beneath even the marrow, in a fourth dimension.”

My Story was originally in Malayalam, titled Ente Katha, describes the events and forces that shaped the authors views as she came into her own. The book earned her praise as well as notoriety for its honesty, particularly about sexuality.

And in an interview with Iqbal Kaur about she wrote My Story the way that she did, Kamala Das said:

“I needed to disturb society out of its complacence. I found the complacence a very ugly state. I wanted to make women of my generation feel that if men could do something wrong, they could do it themselves too. I wanted them to realize that they were equal. I wanted to remove gender difference. I wanted to see that something happened to society, which had strong inhibitions and which only told lies in the public.”

Following is a selection of timeless, thought-provoking quotes from My Story by Kamala Das.

. . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Kamala Das
. . . . . . . . . .

“A poet’s raw material is not stone or clay; it is her personality.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Children are intuitive about people and feel more than adults a sense of rejection.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“I was a burden and a responsibility neither my parents nor my grandmother could put up with for long.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“My grand uncle liked to see women glamorized with jewels and flowers. His second wife, my favorite aunt, was never seen even at night without her heavy jewelry, all gem encrusted and radiant … Each night she came to our house accompanied by her maids and a lantern, looking like a bride. And she walked up the steep staircase of the gatehouse to meet her famous husband in their lush bedroom, kept fragrant with incense and jasmine garlands.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Poets, even the most insignificant of them, are different from other people. They cannot close their shops like shop men and return home. Their shop is their mind and as long as they carry it with them, they feel the pressures and the torments.”

. . . . . . . . . .

10 Poems by Kamala Das
. . . . . . . . . .

“One’s real world is not what is outside him. It is the immeasurable world inside him that is real. Only the one who has decided to travel inwards, will realize that his route has no end.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“The obsession with sin destroyed the mind of several girls who were at the beginning of their adolescence, normal and easy-going. If there was a dearth of sin, sin at any cost had to be manufactured, because forgiving the sinners was a therapeutic exercise, popular with the rabidly virtuous.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Society can well ask me how I could become what I became, although born to parents as high-principled as mine were. Ask the books that I read why I changed. Ask the authors dead and alive who communicated with me and gave me the courage to be myself. The books like a mother-cow licked the calf of my thought into shape and left me to lie at the altar of the world as a sacrificial gift.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Marriage meant nothing more than a show of wealth to families like ours. The bride was unimportant and her happiness a minor issue.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“With words I had destroyed my life. I had used them like swords in what was meant to be a purification dance, but blood was unwittingly shed.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Wherever a writer goes, her notoriety precedes her.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“We are trapped in immortality and our only freedom is the freedom to decompose.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Today at Nariman Point the tall buildings crowd one another. But when I was young and in love with a grey-eyed man it was a marshy waste. We used to walk aimlessly along the quiet Panday Road or cross the Cuffe Parade to walk towards the sun. We did not have a place to rest. But in the glow of those evening suns, we felt that we were Gods who had lost their way and had strayed into an unkind planet.”

. . . . . . . . . .

More about My Story by Kamala Das

• Review on Purple Pencil Project
• Reader discussion on Goodreads
• Wikipedia

. . . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Melanie P. Kumar: Melanie is a Bangalore, India-based independent writer who has always been fascinated with the magic of words. Links to some of her pieces can be found at gonewiththewindwithmelanie.wordpress.com.

The post Quotes from My Story by Kamala Das, the Poet’s Autobiography appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

When the extraordinarily prolific and brilliant writer bell hooks passed away in December 2021, she left behind a tremendous gift for her countless readers: a legacy of thirty adult non-fiction works that will satisfy every reader of this deep thinker and cultural commentator.

In examining the life of bell hooks, there is much to discover about the wisdom in her work. It provides the potential to change every reader’s life and perspective.

Love in its many forms

“The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)

. . . . . . . . . .

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)

. . . . . . . . . .

“… Many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)

. . . . . . . . . .

“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)

. . . . . . . . . .

“Time and time again when I talk to individuals about approaching love with will and intentionality, I hear the fear expressed that this will bring an end to romance. This is simply not so. Approaching romanic love from foundation of care, knowledge, and respect actually intensifies romance.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)

. . . . . . . . . .

“When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposite of nurturance and care.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)

. . . . . . . . . .

“Reviewing the literature on love I noticed how few writers, male or female, talk about the impact of patriarchy, the way in which male domination of women and children stands in the ways of love.” (All About Love: New Visions, 1999)

. . . . . . . . . .

“The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.”  (Communion: The Search for Female Love, 2002)

. . . . . . . . . .

“Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.” (Communion: The Female Search for Love, 2002)

. . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about bell hooks
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
. . . . . . . . . .

Intersections of Race, Class, Patriarchy, & Feminism

“The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.” (Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, 2000)

. . . . . . . . . .

“Once upon a time Black male ‘cool’ was defined by the ways in which Black men confronted hardships of life without allowing their spirits to be ravaged. They took the pain of it and used it alchemically to turn the pain into gold. That burning process required high heat. Black male cool was defined by the ability to withstand the heat and remain centered.” (We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, 2003)

. . . . . . . . . .

“…The struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domination strengthens other liberation struggles. Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism with struggles to end racism or classism undermine their own efforts. Individuals who fight for the eradication of racism or classism while supporting sexist oppression are helping to maintain the cultural basis of all forms of group oppression.” (Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 2014)

. . . . . . . . . .

“Any Black person who clings to the misguided notion that white people represent the embodiment of all that is evil and Black people all that is good remains wedded to the very logic of Western metaphysical dualism that is the heart of racist binary thinking. Such thinking is not liberatory. Like the racist educational ideology it mirrors and imitates, it invites a closing of the mind.” (Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem, 2003)

. . . . . . . . . .

“No Black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’ Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’… No woman has ever written enough.” (Remembered Rapture: the Writer at Work, 1999)

. . . . . . . . . .

“Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about Blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation? (Killing Rage: Ending Racism, 1995)

. . . . . . . . . .

“All of our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.” (Killing Rage: Ending Racism, 1995)

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

Hope and Resistance

“The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.” (Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 1981)

. . . . . . . . . .

“It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term ‘feminism’, to focus on the fact that to be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.” (Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 1981)

. . . . . . . . . .

“The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.” (Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 2012)

. . . . . . . . . .

“We can’t combat white supremacy unless we can teach people to love justice. You have to love justice more than your allegiance to your race, sexuality and gender. It is about justice.” (Interview with Jet magazine, 2013)

. . . . . . . . . .

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count of patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.” (The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, 2004)

. . . . . . . . . .

“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is — it’s to imagine what is possible.” (Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 2012)

. . . . . . . . . .

“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” (Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2003)

. . . . . . . . . .

“To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.” (Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2002)

. . . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who writes about women writers and labor women. After working for the City and County of San Francisco for thirty years, she is now learning everything about Henry David Thoreau in Los Angeles.

The post Love, Resistance and Hope: Quotes by bell hooks appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

There are hugely influential writers who inspire others within their lifetimes, and Joan Didion ( 1934 – 2021 ) was certainly one of them. But it’s after her passing that everything she wrote seems to resonate even more, because we realize that there will be no further words of wisdom. 

Photo above right by Katherine Ballard, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. In her tribute to Joan Didion upon her passing, Nancy Snyder wrote, 

“Joan Didion had her sublime sentences filled with a myriad of details to convey her personal and wholly authentic stories. She wrote about nearly every cultural and political upheaval that transformed the U.S. from the 1960s to the present day.”

Another, equally significant part of Didion’s writing is her observations on day-to-day things in a way that many of us already think about. But the manner in which she expressed them was anything but commonplace. She faced tragedies, like the loss of a beloved husband and a daughter, with words that cannot help but move.

. . . . . . . . .

“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.” (“Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power” (essay originally published in Vogue, 1961)

. . . . . . . . .

“I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.” (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)

. . . . . . . . .

“Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.” (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

“A writer is a person whose most absorbed and passion­ate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. I write entirely to find out what’s on my mind, what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I’m seeing and what it means, what I want and what I’m afraid of.” (“On Keeping a Notebook,” essay included in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)

. . . . . . . . .

“So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.” (“On Keeping a Notebook,” essay included in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)

. . . . . . . . .

“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there, embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.” (UC Riverside commencement address, 1975)

. . . . . . . . .

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” (“Why I Write,” essay originally published in the New York Times Book Review , 1976)

. . . . . . . . .

“… There’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” (“Why I Write,” essay originally published in the New York Times Book Review , 1976)

. . . . . . . . .

“The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own, is one that soothes all children and many writers.” (The White Album, 1979)

. . . . . . . . .

The Center Will Not Hold is the excellent
2017 documentary on Joan Didion
. . . . . . . . .

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses, we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” (The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005)

. . . . . . . . .

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.” (The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005)

. . . . . . . . .

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ” (The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005)

. . . . . . . . .

 “If you are doing a piece about somebody, even if you admire them tremendously and express that in the piece, express that admiration, if they’re not used to being written about, if they’re civilians … they’re not used to seeing themselves through other people’s eyes. So you will always see them from a slightly different angle than they see themselves, and they feel a little betrayed by that.” (Academy of Achievement Interview, June 3, 2006)

. . . . . . . . .

“You get the sense that it’s possible simply to go through life noticing things and writing them down and that this is OK, it’s worth doing. That the seemingly insignificant things that most of us spend our days noticing are really significant, have meaning, and tell us something” ( The Paris Review interview, 2006)

. . . . . . . . .

“When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.” (Blue Nights, 2011)

. . . . . . . . .

“When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.” (Blue Nights, 2011)

. . . . . . . . .

“Do not whine … Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.” (Blue Nights, 2011)

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Melanie P. Kumar: Melanie is a Bangalore, India-based independent writer who has always been fascinated with the magic of words. Links to some of her pieces can be found at gonewiththewindwithmelanie.wordpress.com.

The post In Her Own Words: Joan Didion Quotes on Life, Love, & Writing appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Nearly every line she wrote or spoke was quotable, so it’s a great challenge to choose a selection of quotes by Susan Sontag for a post that’s reasonable in length; here, we’ve attempted such a feat. Painting at right by Juan Bastos ©2009, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons License 3.0.

Achieving fame (and sometimes notoriety) in multiple forms of media — essays, fiction, film, and more — Sontag seemed to embrace her role as provocateur. Susan Sontag pastel portrait at right by Juan Bastos.

In her biography of Susan Sontag on this site, Nancy Snyder writes that she “achieved what was believed to be impossible for any American writer: she could easily pontificate on structuralist philosophy and on the history of interpretation — subjects not widely embraced in American culture — yet Sontag easily made the crossover from the inaccessible intellectual into the realm of established literary star.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Susan Sontag
Photo by Lynn Gilbert, ©1979, courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons, creative commons license 3.0.

. . . . . . . . . .

Notes on Camp (1964)

“What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Clothes, furniture, all the elements of visual décor, for instance, make up a large part of Camp. For Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious’. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”

. . . . . . . . . .

On Photography (1977)

“The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Nobody demands that photography be literate. Nobody can imagine how it could be authoritative. Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Illness as Metaphor (1978)

“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“There is a peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease, as of everything else. Psychologizing seems to provide control over the experiences and events (like grave illnesses) over which people have in fact little or no control. Psychological understanding undermines the ‘reality’ of a disease. That reality has to be explained.

. . . . . . . . . .

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

. . . . . . . . . .

“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of ‘spirit’ over matter.”

. . . . . . . . . .

AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989)

“The AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.”

. . . . . . . . .

“Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. That illness can be not an epic of suffering but the occasion of some kind of self-transcendence is affirmed by sentimental literature and, more convincingly, by case histories offered by doctor-writers. Some illnesses seem more apt than others for this kind of meditation.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Epidemic diseases usually elicit a call to ban the entry of foreigners, immigrants. And xenophobic propaganda has always depicted immigrants as bearers of disease (in the late nineteenth century: cholera, yellow fever, typhoid fever, tuberculosis). … Such is the extraordinary potency and efficacy of the plague metaphor: it allows a disease to be regarded both as something incurred by vulnerable ‘others’ and as (potentially) everyone’s disease.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)

“From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art … To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable.”

. . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

Miscellaneous writings and essays

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don’t become inured to what they are shown — if that’s the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.”  (Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003)

. . . . . . . . . .

“Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering — rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.”   (from a review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil, The New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963)

. . . . . . . . . .

“The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”   (from a review of Selected Essays by Simone Weil, The New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963)

. . . . . . . . . .

“The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.”   (The Benefactor, 1963)

. . . . . . . . . .

“The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”   (Partisan Review, Winter 1967)

. . . . . . . . . .

“I don’t want to express alienation. It isn’t what I feel. I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.”  (“Susan Sontag Finds Romance,” interview with by Leslie Garis, The New York Times, August 2, 1992)

. . . . . . . . . .

“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.” (“Susan Sontag Finds Romance,” interview with by Leslie Garis, The New York Times, August 2, 1992)

. . . . . . . . . .

“One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling … which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. We have more or less the same bodies, but very different kinds of thoughts. I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking.” (from “Susan Sontag: The Rolling Stone Interview” with Jonathan Cott, October 1979)

. . . . . . . . . .

“The tide of undecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents which has washed over and bitten into the facades of monuments and the surface of public vehicles in the city where I live: graffiti as an assertion of disrespect, yes, but most of all simply an assertion … the powerless saying: I’m here, too.”  (“The Pleasure of the Image,” from Writers on Artists, ed. by Daniel Halpern, 1988)

. . . . . . . . . .

“I guess I think I’m writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I’ll be doing something that’s worth their time. I’d be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.”   (From “The Risk Taker,” profile by Gary Younge, The Guardian, January 19, 2002)

. . . . . . . . . .

More about Susan Sontag

• Susan Sontag and the Unholy Practice of Biography
• Susan Sontag on Storytelling, etc.
• The Books of Susan Sontag, Ranked

The post Deep Thinking: 40 Quotes by Susan Sontag appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

To contemplate a quote, or a line from one of Susan Sontag’s (1930 – 2004) many essays or novels, will invariably have the reader pause and read the line or paragraph again. Photo at right, Lynn Gilbert, ©1979, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, creative commons license.

My own literary daydream has been to visit a bookstore, most likely The Strand on Broadway and 12th Street in New York City, and Sontag would be my guide as we strolled the aisles.

Sontag’s commitment to literature and art has made an imprint on my life. In my daydream, Sontag would be the one doing all of the talking — I could only contribute my appreciation with a nodding of my head.

These twenty-one quotes by Sontag would be the vital information she would impart to me on our bookstore journey. These perceptive words of great wisdom strike a chord of familiarity with her millions of readers — and yet, Sontag’s quotes seem to be written especially for the one reader contemplating them. That’s a brilliant writer.

. . . . . . . . .

“All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.”

. . . . . . . . .

“If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other worlds, other territories.”

. . . . . . . . .

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”

. . . . . . . . .

“Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminent of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.”

. . . . . . . . .

“It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.”

. . . . . . . . .

“In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the person who invents it.”

. . . . . . . . .

“Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.”

. . . . . . . . .

“My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.”

. . . . . . . . .

“A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It is a creator of inwardness.”

. . . . . . . . .

“It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”

. . . . . . . . .

“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor.  It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.”

. . . . . . . . .

“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”

. . . . . . . . .

“The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.”

. . . . . . . . .

“All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.”

. . . . . . . . .

“The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.”

. . . . . . . . .

“One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.”

. . . . . . . . .

“I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don’t consider it a moral virtue.”

. . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . .

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

. . . . . . . . .

“To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.”

. . . . . . . . .

“All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.”

. . . . . . . . .

“Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.”

. . . . . . . . .

Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who writes about women writers and labor women. After working for the City and County of San Francisco for thirty years, she is now learning everything about Henry David Thoreau in Los Angeles.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

More about Susan Sontag

• Susan Sontag and the Unholy Practice of Biography
• Susan Sontag on Storytelling, etc.
• The Books of Susan Sontag, Ranked

The post Brilliant Quotes by Susan Sontag appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

A work of nonfiction by Carson, the book is a gracefully written indictment of the pesticide industry that arose in the late 1950s. It presents a piercing look at the damage these chemicals cause to birds, bees, wildlife, and plant life.

From Rachel Carson’s official website:

“Silent Spring inspired the modern environmental movement, which began in earnest a decade later. It is recognized as the environmental text that changed the world.”

She aimed at igniting a democratic activist movement that would not only question the direction of science and technology but would also demand answers and accountability. Rachel Carson was a prophetic voice and her ‘witness for nature’ is even more relevant and needed if our planet is to survive into a 22nd century.”

From this site’s biography of Rachel Carson:

“The public’s growing awareness of the dangers of chemicals created a natural readership for Silent Spring, serialized in The New Yorker beginning June 16, 1962, and published as a book on September 27, 1962.

Silent Spring sold more than 100,000 copies in the first week and was on the bestseller list by Christmas. By now it has sold more than two million copies and has been translated into more than twenty languages.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

Not everyone applauded Carson’s prescient book. Not surprisingly, she was attacked by the pesticide industry, which conspired to discredit her.  A 2012 article in Yale Environment 360 titled “Fifty Years After Silent Spring, Attacks on Science Continue” observed:

“When Silent Spring was published in 1962, author Rachel Carson was subjected to vicious personal assaults that had nothing do with the science or the merits of pesticide use. Those attacks find a troubling parallel today in the campaigns against climate scientists who point to evidence of a rapidly warming world.”

. . . . . . . . . 

Rachel Carson U.S. postage stamp, 1981
. . . . . . . . .

“Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.”

. . . . . . . . .

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

. . . . . . . . .

“In nature nothing exists alone.”

. . . . . . . . .

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost‘s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”

. . . . . . . . .

“A Who’s Who of pesticides is therefore of concern to us all. If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones — we had better know something about their nature and their power.”

. . . . . . . . .

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”

. . . . . . . . .

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

. . . . . . . . .

“Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds.”

. . . . . . . . .

“How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them.”

. . . . . . . . .

“We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.”

. . . . . . . . .

“As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life — a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways.”

. . . . . . . . .

“Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the Earth without making it unfit for all life?”

. . . . . . . . .

“We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effects and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard. Even research men suffer from the handicap of inadequate methods of detecting the beginnings of injury. The lack of sufficiently delicate methods to detect injury before symptoms appear is one of the great unsolved problems in medicine.”

. . . . . . . . .

“It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge.”

. . . . . . . . .

“If, having endured much, we have at last asserted our ‘right to know,’ and if by knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us.”

. . . . . . . . .

“To have risked so much in our efforts to mold nature to our satisfaction and yet to have failed in achieving our goal would indeed by the final irony. Yet this, it seems, is our situation.”

. . . . . . . . .

“Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?”

. . . . . . . . .

Books by Rachel Carson: Before and After Silent Spring

. . . . . . . . .

“If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.”

. . . . . . . . .

“When the public protests. confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizers pills of half truth.”

. . . . . . . . .

“No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”

. . . . . . . . .

“Most of us walk unseeing through the world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us.”

. . . . . . . . .

“The fact that every meal we eat carries its load of chlorinated hydrocarbons is the inevitable consequence of the almost universal spraying or dusting of agricultural crops with these poisons.”

. . . . . . . . .

“When one is concerned with the mysterious and wonderful functioning of the human body, cause and effect are seldom simple and easily demonstrated relationships. They may be widely separated both in space and time. To discover the agent of disease and death depends on a patient piecing together of many seemingly distinct and unrelated facts developed through a vast amount of research in widely separated fields.”

. . . . . . . . .

“By their very nature chemical controls are self-defeating, for they have been devised and applied without taking into account the complex biological systems against which they have been blindly hurled.”

. . . . . . . . .

“The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. Man, too, is part of this balance.”

. . . . . . . . .

“We in this generation, must come to terms with nature, and I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”

. . . . . . . . .

“In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life.”

More about Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

• The Story of Silent Spring
• How Silent Spring Ignited the Environmental Movement
• Reader discussion on Goodreads

The post 27 Quotes from Silent Spring by Rachel Carson appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Morrison based Beloved on a historic incident. In 1856, an enslaved female escaped and crossed the Ohio river from Kentucky into Ohio to seek freedom.

Instead, she was captured, and killed her child so she wouldn’t have to be returned to enslavement. Similarly, Sethe, the protagonist of the novel, kills her baby, who she calls Beloved, and is ever after haunted by her ghost.

Beloved earned Morrison a Pulitzer Prize. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 to honor her body of published works. These included The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977) and Tar Baby (1981). Morrison went on to publish many other works of fiction and nonfiction. From the publisher:

“Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Toni Morrison
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
. . . . . . . . .

Morrison wrote of Beloved:

“In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Something that is loved is never lost.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“I don’t care what she is. Grown don’t mean a thing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that supposed to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Sifting daylight dissolves the memory, turns it into dust motes floating in light.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind. ”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Unless carefree, mother love was a killer.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Sad as it was that she did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“She did not tell them to clean up their lives, or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek, or its glory-bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have is the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they could not have it.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“No more running-from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this Earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D. Garner: it cost too much!”

. . . . . . . . .

Toni Morrison on Bookshop.org*

. . . . . . . . . . 

“People who die bad don’t stay in the ground.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“It’s not about choosing somebody over her. It’s about making space for somebody along with her.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“What’s fair ain’t necessarily right.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Nothing could be counted on in a world where even when you were a solution you were a problem.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don’t get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“More it hurt more better it is. Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“It was the right thing to do, but she had no right to do it.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.”

. . . . . . . . . .

“You just can’t mishandle creatures and expect success.”

. . . . . . . . .

*This is a Bookshop.org affiliate link. If a product is purchased after linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps us to keep growing.

The post Powerful Quotes from Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

The novel helped fuel the anti-slavery movement, and is thought to have changed the course of history as well the publication business. No other book sold as many copies in the 19th century, other than the Bible.

Stowe’s astounding success with novel affected the fight for the abolition of slavery and displayed her fearlessness by writing on this subject in a white-dominated world.

Ever modest, Stowe barely took credit for her work. “I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation,” she wrote in the introduction to the 1879 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Further, she explained in the Author’s Preface:

“The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us; to show their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for them, by their best friends, under it.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

How Harriet Beecher Stowe was Inspired to Write Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. . . . . . . . . . .

“Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“The longest way must have its close —  the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.” 

. . . . . . . . . . .

“…the heart has no tears to give, — it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.” 

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Death! Strange that there should be such a word, and such a thing, and we ever forget it; that one should be living, warm and beautiful, full of hopes, desires and wants, one day, and the next be gone, utterly gone, and forever!”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Treat ’em like dogs, and you’ll have dogs’ works and dogs’ actions. Treat ’em like men, and you’ll have men’s works.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“I am braver than I was because I have lost all; and he who has nothing to lose can afford all risks.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

“So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don’t somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good not to do harm.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“I make no manner of doubt that you threw a very diamond of truth at me, though you see it hit me so directly in the face that it wasn’t exactly appreciated, at first.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Could I ever have loved you, had I not known you better than you know yourself?”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“All men are free and equal, in the grave,”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“It is with the oppressed, enslaved, African race that I cast in my lot; and if I wished anything, I would wish myself two shades darker, rather than one lighter.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Everything your money can buy, given with a cold, averted face, is not worth one honest tear shed in real sympathy?”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“My country again! Mr. Wilson, you have a country; but what country have I, or anyone like me, born of slave mothers? What laws are there for us? We don’t make them,—we don’t consent to them,—we have nothing to do with them; all they do for us is to crush us, and keep us down.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Sir, 1 haven’t any country, any more than I have any father. But I’m going to have one. I don’t want anything of your country, except to let me alone—to go peaceably out of it; and when I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country, and its laws I will obey. But if any man tries to stop me, let him take care, for I am desperate. I’ll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me!”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Deeds of heroism are wrought here more than those of romance, when, defying torture, and braving death itself, the fugitive voluntarily threads his way back to the terrors and perils of that dark land, that he may bring out his sister, or mother, or wife.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

Learn more about Harriet Beecher Stowe
. . . . . . . . . .

“Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“I’ve lost everything in this world, and it’s clean gone, forever– and now I can’t lose heaven, too; no, I can’t get to be wicked, besides all.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“What poor, mean trash this whole business of human virtue is! A mere matter, for the most part, of latitude and longitude, and geographical position, acting with natural temperament. The greater part is nothing but an accident.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“When a heavy weight presses the soul to the lowest level at which endurance is possible, there is an instant and desperate effort of every physical and moral nerve to throw off the weight; and hence the heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“There have been times when I have thought, if the whole country would sink, and hide all this injustice and misery from the light, I would willingly sink with it.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

“We ought to be free to meet and mingle, –to rise by our individual worth, without any consideration of caste or color; and they who deny us this right are false to their own professed principals of human equality.”

. . . . . . . . . . .

More about Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

• Wikipedia
• The First Great American Novel
• The Pervading Influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on Pop Culture
• Listen to a free audio recording on Librivox

The post Quotes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.