Posts Tagged ‘writers’
All we own, at least for the short time we have it, is our life. With it we write what we know of the world. – Alice Walker
Adore this Janis Joplin quote. Reminds me that too often we get hung up on ideas of ‘forever’ when we should just be appreciating ‘now’. I don’t understand why half the world is still crying, man, when the other half of the world is still crying too, man, and it can’t get it together. I [...]
One of my all-time favourite essays is George Orwell’s Why I Write. He says there are four great motives for writing and, with characteristic honesty, puts this at the top of his list: (i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on [...]
High on my list of favourite feminist books is Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Clear, succinct and utterly even-handed, the book – published in 1792 – was a good two centuries ahead of its time. I knew very little about Wollstonecraft, however, until I happened on the news that a charity [...]
“Every man, woman, and child over the age, let us say, of twenty-one or thirty, at the very outside, should never do anything extremely important or crucial in their life without first consulting a list of persons in the world, living or dead, whom he loves… My God, it could be the finest, most terrible, [...]
When courage fails, silence and evasion are likely to manifest themselves. -Virginia Woolf ‘Three Guineas’
If, like the truth, falsehood had only one face, we should know better where we are, for we should then take the opposite of what a liar said to be the truth. But the opposite of a truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field… There are a thousand ways of missing the [...]
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church; and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I [...]
Posted by Irresponsibility Sixteenth century essayist Michel de Montaigne observed that: “Fear, desire, and hope impel us into the future and rob us of the sense and consideration of that which is, in order to keep us musing over that which will be”. These days, fear, desire, and hope get a helping hand from media, [...]
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