“I remember very well the first time I heard the saying ‘The Personal Is Political.’ [...] I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they ‘felt’, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done... See more

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

~ Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Literature is a wound from which flows the indispensable divorce between words and things.”

~ Carlos Fuentes, Diana

“It is said that the personal is political. That is not true, of course. At the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to protect ourselves, to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives. Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing.”

~ Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

A good quotation is often a distillation of a larger idea; it’s a mistake to think a clever line on its own proves or disproves much of anything.

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

~ Sylvia Plath, Journals

“‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’”

~ Lewis Carroll, “ Alice in Wonderland”

“The concept of the ‘definitive text’ corresponds only to religion or exhaustion.”

~ Jorge Luis Borges, The Homeric Versions

“In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,

For they in thee a thousand errors note;

But ’tis my heart that loves what they despise,

Who, in despite of view, is pleased to dote ...”

~Shakespeare, Sonnet 141