Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination.
—Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”
Romance is sex plus love. Erotica is sex plus fear.
—
Tiffany Reisz, THE SIREN
Interrrrrresting. And steamy!
Form and technique matter, of course, but we read fiction to satisfy a more basic need—to imagine our way into other lives, to explore characters and situations that tell us something new about the world, and maybe about ourselves, or to remind us of something important that we may have forgotten.
—Tom Perrotta, in the introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2012
You think I’m not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you’ll burn.
—
Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing by Margaret Atwood
ODing on Margaret Atwood poetry for tonight’s Bookrageous.
He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.
—James Salter, ALL THAT IS
Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word “love” to the people you love so when it matters most to say it, you will.
—I’m finally reading TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS and you guys were all right about it.
In which a book really changed my life.
We like to talk about books as being life-changing, but what happens when one actually is?
By defining books as against technology, we deny our true selves, we deny the power of the book. Let’s restore to publishing its true reputation—not as a hedge against the future, not as a bulwark against radical change, not as a citadel amidst the barbarians, but rather as the future at hand, as the radical agent of change, as the barbarian. The business of literature is blowing shit up.
The critical response to Lean In is not entirely misplaced, but it is emblematic of the dangers of public womanhood. Public women, and feminists in particular, have to be everything to everyone; when they aren’t, they are excoriated for their failure.
—
Roxane Gay, The Meaning of Leaning
And here’s the missing piece of the Sheryl Sandberg commentary. Brava, Roxane.
Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human?
—
Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds
(yep, reading it again)
