Anna B

“literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, negligible and nonexisent.” We lack a language to capture “this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain,” and if we

Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character.

I lend you a copy of the novel I loved, you read it, and now its beauty resides in both of our hearts

We have never before had access to so many perspectives, ideas, and information. Much of it is fleetingly interesting but ultimately inconsequential—not to be confused with expertise, let alone wisdom.

Most significant to those of us interested in the Heroine’s Journey is that for a hero in a Hero’s Journey, a prevailing concept and perpetuated message is that asking for (or needing) help is BAD. Because a hero who asks for help is perceived as weak by the story

Learning to write comes from reading, both the work of published writers and of our peers, and from using one’s powers of insight and creativity to analyze what one reads and figure out why it works when it does and what is missing when it doesn’t. This is where knowledge is gained, and it’s slow and frustrating, nebulous, diffuse, much less direct

With the final how we may reasonably expect that the grammatical, argumentative, and symbolic denouement is just around the comma-swiveling corner