Debbie Foster

J. B. Priestley, in a 1964 book on precognition and related questions called Man & Time, acknowledges that we cannot help but be biased in one direction or the other: “either we want life to be tidy, clear, fully understood, contained within definite limits, or we long for it to seem larger, wilder, stranger. Faced with some odd incident, either we

I cannot know that words are around and not read them.

Place your warm hand on your cool belly. Does your belly feel the warm or does your hand feel the cool? This, I think, is one of the fundamental mysteries.

…we are simultaneously confused about how to carry out our responsibilities to children and about what it means to be an adult. We seem to have settled instead on keeping everyone in the perpetual limbo of adolescence, rushing children into a state they are unprepared for, and allowing adults to remain there as long as they would like. Peter Pan

There are some worlds where it is really hard to feel good about yourself, or to think well of yourself. There are some where it's hard to think at all. Our worlds are full of impediments. It is not just that our desires are thwarted by circumstance, although that's part of it, but equally our desires are by circumstance, our wants are shaped by

The Enlightenment was a scene of intellectual conflict that drew upon utterly foreign cultures in the ancient world and in the New World to destabilize systems of oppression. It was not a unified program but a process of creative intellectual destruction.

There is no objectively correct length for a sentence. The length of a sentence is one of its modes of expression. When I read Kleist's sentences, I feel a deep sense of joy that comes from the language permeating my brain. Any style that can absorb the trembling that arises from this joy and cause an earthquake that unsettles the landscape of

It is the assumption of the censorship that we prefer safety to danger, closedness to openness, the familiar to the strange. So Freud says, think of the censor as your most important conversational partner rather than the tyrant you are always managing. Where there was sovereignty, there can be mutual exchange; where there is tyranny an experiment

resistance reveals preference and affinity, and fear and suspicion, political sympathy and personal antipathy, and the way these might come or go together. This is resistance as conflicted engagement