Debbie Foster

As Dorianne Laux wrote, "Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's."

The power of a specialist is that they can change the stories we tell ourselves. If you believe you are fatigued for a medical reason, a powerful doctor should be able to fix you. If you believe that vengeful ghosts haunt you at night, an effective medium should be able to chase them away. To the extent you consider a specialist powerful, you give

The legend most strongly associated with Knossos is that of Theseus and the Minotaur, and it is arguably the oldest surviving European story.

How low her expectations of herself, her sense of self-worth, must have been not even to have attempted this. Her sense of life was that everything universally granted to everyone else was beyond her.

In the closed logic of the folktale, magic is normal: people use it, sometimes they suffer for it or are fooled by it, but they are never very surprised by it.

A fascinating fact is that the syntax center of the brain is in the part where we process music, not in the part responsible for vocabulary acquisition. So making beautiful sentences is a musical endeavor.

… perhaps the thing that religion and art share is that mysterious progression: the emotional and visceral process of one idea breaking down to make way for the entrance of another.

several studies had found that people with vivid imagery tended to be more inward, absorbed in the drift of their own minds.

Resistance is always a way of talking about agency and language and invention; it is a way of trying to sort out our determinisms from our freedoms, of determining where what we call our control begins and ends.