Women authors from the United Kingdom

"On the face of it there is something rather strange about human psychology. Human beings live in a state of mind called sanity, on a small planet in space. They are not quite sure whether the space around them is infinite or not, either way it is unthinkable. If they think about time, they find that it is inconceivable that it had a beginning. It is also inconceivable that it did not have a beginning. Thoughts of this kind are not disturbing to sanity, which is obviously a remarkable phenomenon that deserves more recognition."

"The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment."

"Only the impossible is worth attempting. In everything else one is sure to fail."

"The fact that something is far-fetched is no reason why it should not be true; it cannot be as far-fetched as the fact that something exists."

"Astonishment is the only realistic emotion."

"People accept their limitations so as to prevent themselves from wanting anything they might get."

"It is inconceivable that anything should be existing. It is not inconceivable that a lot of people should also be existing who are not interested in the fact that they exist. But it is certainly very odd."

"The remarkable thing about the human mind is its range of limitations."

"The human race has to be bad at psychology; if it were not, it would understand why it is bad at everything else."

"When someone says his conclusions are objective, he means that they are based on prejudices which many other people share."

"The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs."

"Society expresses its sympathy for the geniuses of the past to distract attention from the fact that it has no intention of being sympathetic to the geniuses of the present."

"In an autocracy, one person has his way; in an aristocracy a few people have their way; in a democracy, no one has his way."

"Democracy: everyone should have an equal opportunity to obstruct everybody else."

"When people talk about 'the sanctity of the individual' they mean 'the sanctity of the statistical norm'."

"In an unenlightened society some people are forced to play degrading social roles; in an enlightened society, everyone is."

"Society is everybody's way of punishing one another because they daren't take it out on the universe."

"'Social justice' - the expression of universal hatred."

"Society is a self-regulating mechanism for preventing the fulfilment of its members."

"Human nature: vindictiveness lightly coated with dishonesty."

"The human race believes in not taking its problems seriously enough to solve them."

"People having religions is an insult to the universe."

"People have been marrying and bringing up children for centuries now. Nothing has ever come of it."

"The object of the educational system is to make the child feel suitably guilty for the harm that has been done to him."

"Education by the State is a contradiction in terms. Intellectual development is only possible to those who have seen through society."

"In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is lucky to escape with his life."

"What is scandalous is not that stupid people should sometimes inherit private incomes; but that clever people should sometimes not."

"The human race knows enough about thinking to prevent it."

"One of the greatest superstitions of our time is the belief that it has none."

"That society exists to frustrate the individual may be seen from its attitude to work. It is only morally acceptable if you do not want to do it. If you want to, it becomes a personal pleasure."

"Lack of clarity is always a sign of dishonesty."

"It is superfluous to be humble on one's own behalf; so many people are willing to do it for one."

"The only important thing to realise about history is that it all took place in the last five minutes."

"I cannot write long books; I leave that for those who have nothing to say."

"The perception that existence exists invalidates the normal personality,as does the imminence of death."

"Now if you see that it is inconceivable that anything should exist, it is evident that at least one inconceivable fact is there. That is to say, that which exists is not limited to the conceivable. Since the inconceivable is there, it is impossible to set any limit to the quantity of inconceivableness which may be present in the situation. Now were the existence of anything consistently to remind you of the fact of inconceivability, since it is impossible to live without interacting with a large number of existing things, it would be impossible for you to feel in the same way about the conceivable."

"Now if anyone were reminded about the inconceivable by the fact of existence at all constantly, he would sooner or later have the perception that there may be inconceivable considerations which are inconceivably more important than any conceivable consideration could be."

"Now if you do have a perception that any conceivable consideration may be utterly invalidated by some other consideration which you do not know, and if you are reminded of this perception constantly by the fact that things exist, certain modifications take place in the way you feel about things. These modifications have not taken place in the psychology of most people."

"The starting point is that one is interested in the universe, one observes that one is finite and that this is intolerable. One has a limited time and apparently limited capacity with which to find anything out. Therefore it is possible to despair. There are many orders of despair, and none of them are known to normal psychology. This is demonstrated by the fact that it has not become existential. Normal psychology will never devalue anything. Existential psychology, at least to a certain point, consists of exploiting the recoil from the despair of finiteness. The recoil is a drive with at least the instinctive immediacy of the survival instinct. There is no point in saying, 'What is there to do? What could such a drive possibly tend towards?'. The survival instinct tends to prolong life. The fundamental drive tends to inform itself about the universe."

"Young people wonder how the adult world can be so boring. The secret is that it is not boring to adults because they have learned to enjoy simple things like covert malice at one another's expense. This is why they talk so much about the value of human understanding and sympathy - it has a certain rarity value in their world."

"Children need admiration rather than affection."

"Progress towards sanity is achieved by abandoning first the desire for omnipotence and then that for exceptional achievement."

"In the universe there is room for an infinite series of beginnings."

"I have long had a theory that the popularity of Christianity has always depended on its appeal to the sadism of its adherents. The exceptional should be crucified, saith Society; and somehow everyone suspects (in spite of all arguments to the contrary) that if there is a God, he may be exceptional in some way. So the figure of Christ crucified becomes the figure of the dangerous exceptional alien—suitably defeated. 'Only a suffering God can help', said Bonhoeffer, licking his lips."

"The most exciting thing possible is actually true."

"What appear to be the most valuable aspects of the theoretical physics we have are the mathematical descriptions which enable us to predict events. These equations are, we would argue, the only realities we can be certain of in physics; any other ways we have of thinking about the situation are visual aids or mnemonics which make it easier for beings with our sort of macroscopic experience to use and remember the equations."

"It is actually a principle of modern paternalism that if you want something you should be stopped from having it[…] Most foods are harmful to some people if taken in excess, and I expect the only reason that carrots are still available without a prescription is that no one has got very excited about them, or claimed that they might cure cancer."

"It is easier to make people appear equally stupid than to make them equally clever, so teaching methods are adopted which make it practically impossible for anyone to learn anything."

"I spent a couple of years between eleven and thirteen analysing the social evaluations that were taken for granted, also acquiring a thorough scepticism about processes regarded as causal, and the consistency of the physical world, as well as the reliability of my own mental processes. By the time I was thirteen I was running out of things to think about, so starting on a run of exam-taking seemed all the more appropriate, as I was finding it difficult to make use of spare time."

"It is when the commercial factor enters into the situation that the possibility of genuine individual liberty arises."

"It has never seemed to me offensive that persons should be other persons' paid servants; but that other persons should be other persons' doctors, who are able to prescribe and refuse chemicals, has always seemed to me abominable."

"The basis of capitalism is that if a tiger rushes towards you, you need a gun. If you acquired a gun at some point in time previous to the tiger's attack, and have it ready to hand, this is useful. If you have not actually got a gun, but know that you could acquire one at some point in the future, this is not so good. The problem is to survive so as to reach the future. The essence of communism is that nobody may have guns unless everybody has guns, and the only way anybody can get guns is if the collective-at-large sees fit to make a universal issue. And you may not have a better gun than the collective sees fit to issue for everybody. So if the collective does not actually get round to issuing any guns at all, everybody will be equally likely to be eaten by tigers."

"Couched, of course, in tones of the utmost friendliness and benevolence, they unite in regretting that he [Somerset Maugham] was able to fulfil his own wishes."

"Well, he would, wouldn't he?"

"'Tis never for their wisdom that one loves the wisest, or for their wit that one loves the wittiest; 'tis for benevolence, and virtue, and honest fondness, one loves people; the other qualities make one proud of loving them too."

"A physician can sometimes parry the scythe of death, but has no power over the sand in the hourglass."

"Women bear Crosses better than Men do, but bear Surprizes – worse."

"The tree of deepest root is found Least willing still to quit the ground; 'Twas therefore said by ancient sages, That love of life increased with years. So much, that in our latter stages, When pains grow sharp and sickness rages, The greatest love of life appears."

"The picture placed the busts between Adds to the thought much strength; Wisdom and Wit are little seen, But Folly's at full length."

"The driving forces of the universe, the framework upon which it is built up in all its parts, belong to another phase of manifestation than our physical plane, having other dimensions than the three to which we are habituated, and perceived by other modes of consciousness than those to which we are accustomed."

"We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive. We move among invisible forms whose actions we very often do not perceive at all, though we may be profoundly affected by them."

"The true nature of the gods is that of magical images shaped out of the astral plane by mankind's thought, and influenced by the mind."

"Symbols are to the mind what tools are to the hand—an extended application of its powers."

"All gods are one God, and all goddesses are one Goddess, and there is one Initiator."

"There is something very intimate and personal about one's books. They reveal so much of one's private soul."

"To say that a thing is imaginary is not to dispose of it in the realm of mind, for the imagination, or the image making faculty, is a very important part of our mental functioning. An image formed by the imagination is a reality from the point of view of psychology; it is quite true that it has no physical existence, but are we going to limit reality to that which is material? We shall be far out of our reckoning if we do, for mental images are potent things, and although they do not actually exist on the physical plane, they influence it far more than most people suspect."

"Psychotherapy may begin with the primitive, but it must end with the divine, for both are integral factors in the human mind."

"The spirit of religious persecution is not the special failing of any particular faith, but springs eternal in the human breast."

"[Describes visiting a factory farm shed where she saw a large male boar,] his huge head hanging low towards the barren floor. As I came level with him he raised his head and dragged himself slowly towards me on lame legs. With deliberation he looked straight at me, staring directly into my eyes. It seemed to me that I saw in those sad, intelligent, penetrating eyes a plea, a question to which I had no answer: "Why are you doing this to me?""

"There is no such thing as a silent poem."

"There is an extra loss for a Welsh poet writing in English, and that is, the longing for Welsh, the secret language.. of all the centuries of speech and song."

"If civilisation drowns"

"Listening to a Gillian Clarke poem is an intensely sensual experience, concrete as it is musical."

"We followed my mother to the market-place, where she placed us in a row against a large house, with our backs to the wall and our arms folded across our breasts. I, as the eldest, stood first, Hannah next to me, then Dinah; and our mother stood beside, crying over us. My heart throbbed with grief and terror so violently, that I pressed my hands quite tightly across my breast, but I could not keep it still, and it continued to leap as though it would burst out of my body. But who cared for that? Did one of the many bystanders, who were looking at us so carelessly, think of the pain that wrung the hearts of the negro woman and her young ones? No, no! They were not all bad, I dare say, but slavery hardens white people's hearts towards the blacks; and many of them were not slow to make their remarks upon us aloud, without regard to our grief—though their light words fell like cayenne on the fresh wounds of our hearts. Oh those white people have small hearts who can only feel for themselves."

"I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he was about to purchase, and who talked about my shape and size in like words—as if I could no more understand their meaning than the dumb beasts. I was then put up for sale. The bidding commenced at a few pounds, and gradually rose to fifty seven, when I was knocked down to the highest bidder; and the people who stood by said that I had fetched a great sum for so young a slave."

"I then saw my sisters led forth, and sold to different owners; so that we had not the sad satisfaction of being partners in bondage. When the sale was over, my mother hugged and kissed us, and mourned over us, begging of us to keep up a good heart, and do our duty to our new masters. It was a sad parting; one went one way, one another, and our poor mammy went home with nothing."

"It was night when I reached my new home. The house was large and built at the bottom of a very high hill; but I could not see much of it that night. I saw too much of it afterward. The stones and the timber were the best things in it; they were not so hard as the hearts of the owners."

"My mistress ... caused me to know the exact difference between the smart of the rope, the cart-whip, and the cow-skin, when applied to my naked body by her own cruel hand."

"To strip me naked—to hang me up by the wrists and lay my flesh open with the cow-skin, was an ordinary punishment for even a slight offence."

"One day a heavy squall of wind and rain came on suddenly, and my mistress sent me round the corner of the house to empty a large earthen jar. The jar was already cracked with an old deep crack that divided it in the middle, and in turning it upside down to empty it, it parted in my hand. I could not help the accident, but I was dreadfully frightened, looking forward to a severe punishment. I ran crying to my mistress, "O mistress, the jar has come in two." "You have broken it, have you?" she replied; "come directly here to me." I came trembling: she stripped and flogged me long and severely with the cow-skin; as long as she had strength to use the lash, for she did not give over till she was quite tired.—When my master came home at night, she told him of my fault; and oh, frightful! how he fell a swearing. After abusing me with every ill name he could think of, (too, too bad to speak in England,) and giving me several heavy blows with his hand, he said, "I shall come home to-morrow morning at twelve, on purpose to give you a round hundred." He kept his word—Oh sad for me! I cannot easily forget it. He tied me up upon a ladder, and gave me a hundred lashes with his own hand, and master Benjy stood by to count them for him. When he had licked me for some time he sat down to take breath; then after resting, he beat me again and again, until he was quite wearied, and so hot (for the weather was very sultry), that he sank back in his chair, almost like to faint."

"One of the cows got loose from the stake, and eat one of the sweet-potatoe slips. I was milking when my master found it out. He came to me, and without any more ado, stooped down, and taking off his heavy boot, he struck me such a severe blow in the small of my back, that I shrieked with agony, and thought I was killed; and I feel a weakness in that part to this day. The cow was frightened at his violence, and kicked down the pail and spilt the milk all about. My master knew that this accident was his own fault, but he was so enraged that he seemed glad of an excuse to go on with his ill usage. I cannot remember how many licks he gave me then, but he beat me till I was unable to stand, and till he himself was weary."

"I was not permitted to see my mother or father, or poor sisters and brothers, to say good bye, though going away to a strange land, and might never see them again. Oh the Buckra people who keep slaves think that black people are like cattle, without natural affection. But my heart tells me it is far otherwise."

"We ... worked through the heat of the day; the sun flaming upon our heads like fire, and raising salt blisters in those parts which were not completely covered. Our feet and legs, from standing in the salt water for so many hours, soon became full of dreadful boils, which eat down in some cases to the very bone, afflicting the sufferers with great torment."

"Mr. D---- was usually quite calm. He would stand by and give orders for a slave to be cruelly whipped, and assist in the punishment, without moving a muscle of his face; walking about and taking snuff with the greatest composure. Nothing could touch his hard heart—neither sighs, nor tears, nor prayers, nor streaming blood; he was deaf to our cries, and careless of our sufferings.—Mr. D---- has often stripped me naked, hung me up by the wrists, and beat me with the cow-skin, with his own hand, till my body was raw with gashes. Yet there was nothing very remarkable in this; for it might serve as a sample of the common usage of the slaves on that horrible island."

"Poor Daniel was lame in the hip, and could not keep up with the rest of the slaves; and our master would order him to be stripped and laid down on the ground, and have him beaten with a rod of rough briar till his skin was quite red and raw. He would then call for a bucket of salt, and fling upon the raw flesh till the man writhed on the ground like a worm, and screamed aloud with agony. This poor man's wounds were never healed, and I have often seen them full of maggots, which increased his torments to an intolerable degree. He was an object of pity and terror to the whole gang of slaves, and in his wretched case we saw, each of us, our own lot, if we should live to be as old."

"This cruel son of a cruel father ... had no heart—no fear of God; he had been brought up by a bad father in a bad path, and he delighted to follow in the same steps. There was a little old woman among the slaves called Sarah, who was nearly past work; and, Master Dickey being the overseer of the slaves just then, this poor creature, who was subject to several bodily infirmities, and was not quite right in her head, did not wheel the barrow fast enough to please him. He threw her down on the ground, and after beating her severely, he took her up in his arms and flung her among the prickly-pear bushes, which are all covered over with sharp venomous prickles. By this her naked flesh was so grievously wounded, that her body swelled and festered all over, and she died a few days after."

"In telling my own sorrows, I cannot pass by those of my fellow-slaves—for when I think of my own griefs, I remember theirs."

"The poor slaves had built up a place with boughs and leaves, where they might meet for prayers, but the white people pulled it down twice, and would not allow them even a shed for prayers."

"I am often much vexed, and I feel great sorrow when I hear some people in this country say, that the slaves do not need better usage, and do not want to be free. They believe the foreign people, who deceive them, and say slaves are happy. I say, Not so. How can slaves be happy when they have the halter round their neck and the whip upon their back? and are disgraced and thought no more of than beasts?—and are separated from their mothers, and husbands, and children, and sisters, just as cattle are sold and separated?"

"There are days when you wish things could be different, but ultimately I can’t not do feminism and I don’t want to live with inequality, so I can’t really regret it. I think what happened to me was a bit of a wake-up call for society at large, it was a pretty high price I had to pay but it wasn’t completely pointless because [abuse is] something that we now talk about and we’re trying to figure out."

"We're used to the idea that women aren't represented in our culture and media and politics and films. The idea that this extended to what was sold as objective - the idea of medicine and science, that they were also underrepresenting women - was just mind-blowing to me."

"I found it very shocking and worrying in one study that looked at male and female cells and exposed them both to estrogen and to a virus. The female cell was able to use the estrogen to fight off the virus, and the male cell wasn’t able to use the estrogen and the virus took over. That was so tantalizing and also so infuriating because the vast majority of human cell studies are still done on male cells. When you look at a study like that, you can’t help thinking about how many more treatments we have ruled out at the cell stage because we only tested it on male cells."

"One of the big problems with the way we’ve laid out cities is that they’ve been laid out in such a way to serve the needs of this mythical male breadwinner who has a wife home in the suburbs…And it’s completely untrue to how women and people live their lives. They’ve got to take kids to the doctor, to school, get groceries, check in on a relative …all the things we are doing on a daily basis requires a lot of complicated logistics."

"India has had a spiritual freedom never known until lately to the West. Christianity when it came offering its spiritual philosophy of life imposed an iron dogma upon the European peoples. Those who could not accept this dogma, whatever it happened to be at the moment, paid so heavy a penalty that the legend of the Car of Juggernaut (Jagannath) is far truer of Europe than Asia.""

"Whereas in India the soul was free from the beginning to choose what it would, ranging from the dry bread of atheism to the banquets offered by many-colored passionate gods and goddesses, each shadowing forth some different aspect of the One whom in the inmost chambers of her heart India has always adored. Therefore the spiritual outlook was universal. Each took unrebuked what he needed. The children were at home in the house of their father, while Europe crouched under the lash of a capricious Deity whose ways were beyond all understanding."

"But while India fixed her eyes on the Ultimate she did not forget that objective science is the beginning of wisdom. There the foundations of mathematical and mechanical knowledge were well and truly laid by the Noble Race."

"It is the philosophies of this great race that I propose to examine. It is interesting to wonder along what lines it might have developed later if its ancestral heritage had been less diffused and intermingled with other such different stocks as it found in India on arrival, or were forced by many invasions and conquests to accept later."

"And the Mahabharata and Ramayana may in consequence be said to be the Bibles of the people as well as their inexhaustible treasure-houses of story... A treasury of story indeed! I read almost daily in both, marveling at the vast fertility, the tropic splendor of romance unfolded in either, but still more at the nobil- ity of ideals set forth, the great passion for the Unseen, the Beautiful, and Entirely Desirable, both in man and woman, which has always been the soul of India."

"In this vast and little-known epic — a series of gorgeously colored romances of lovely queens and mighty kings, full of a fascination that only those who care for true romance can realize — lies embedded a pearl of whose beauty and luster the world is aware. It is known as the Lord’s Song — or the Song Celestial — and it represents one of the highest flights of the conditioned spirit to its unconditioned Source ever achieved. It is assigned to the fifth century B.C. though opinions as to dates vary."

"There is a place uplifted nine thousand feet in purest air where one of the most ancient tracks in the world runs from India into Tibet."

"Many centuries ago the Ranipur Kingdom was ruled by the Maharao Rai Singh a prince of the great lunar house of the Rajputs. Expecting a bride from some far away kingdom (the name of this is unrecorded) he built the Hall of Pleasure as a summer palace, a house of rare and costly beauty. A certain great chamber he lined with carved figures of the Gods and their stories, almost unsurpassed for truth and life. So, with the pine trees whispering about it the secret they sigh to tell, he hoped to create an earthly Paradise with this Queen in whom all loveliness was perfected. And then some mysterious tragedy ended all his hopes. It was rumoured that when the Princess came to his court, she was, by some terrible mistake, received with insult and offered the position only of one of his women. After that nothing was known. Certain only is it that he fled to the hills, to the home of his broken hope, and there ended his days in solitude, save for the attendance of two faithful friends who would not abandon him even in the ghostly quiet of the winter when the pine boughs were heavy with snow and a spectral moon stared at the panthers shuffling through the white wastes beneath."

"With me and my queer nature, that set me so at odds with the world and all its ordinary rules, I could not find a place in it to live and be content."

"They will turn my passion into something gross and wrong... It is only love, Helenonly that."

"It is now widely agreed that the economy of western Europe contracted in the later Middle Ages, but the causes of this depression and its time-limits are still disputed. Professor Postan argues that the depression was intimately connected with a decline in population beginning early in the fourteenth century and brought about by the operation of Malthusian checks and soil exhaustion."

"Much work that is absolutely essential for the continuance and progress of an ordered society has a severely limited attraction for those who perform it. How, nevertheless, men and women were persuaded to work regularly or at all in the Middle Ages has provided one of the central themes in the study of the period, for this is what we study in the institutions of slavery, serfdom and villeinage—all three were ways and means of persuading reluctant workers to work."

"Between the early fifteenth century and the late, the expectation of life of a monk at age 20 fell by eight years, and at age 25 by more than six."

"In his Rule, St. Benedict entrusted all the material concerns of the monastery to a single official. The cellarer, as he was called, was to follow the abbot's instructions in all things, but with this proviso it was to give the monks their due allowance of food at the appointed time, take care of the sick, the children who were then part of the monastic community, and the poor, and look after the monster's utensils and property as though these were the sacred vessels of the altar."

"To learn, you must be humble. You must be prepared to admit your ignorance. You must allow yourselves to be filled with the vital information presented to you via the skills and dedication of those who have gone before you down the long path to enlightenment."

"If you are not able to travel, he told me, the next best thing is to read. Read all you can, girl. And store up that knowledge, for you never know when you will need it."

"Better foolish and honest than clever and false."

"Reputation is for those who can afford it."

"For, what is home? Surely more than a set of rooms, a roof, an address? Home suggests belonging. Suggests warmth, safety, companionship. Love."

"There is none so quick to dismiss what they don’t understand as those who are afraid of it. And maybe with reason."

"what can be imagined can be brought into being."

"We are each mistresses of our own happiness. We ought not to look to others to supply it."

"Faith requires no proof. No evidence. No explanation. Faith is entirely a matter of trust and belief. We cannot know, we can only believe."

"there is no courage in being fearless. Do you not know that? A person who knows fear and yet can still think of others, well, he be a brave man."

"Poverty has a way of taking the edge off principles. Hunger can blunt them altogether"

"And as for company … I do not crave the companionship of other women, for I have never found one who did not judge me against herself and find me either to be envied or pitied. As for the friendship of men … well, when the day comes when one is man enough to treat me as his equal, then, only then, will I allow desire to be my guide."

"Nevertheless, disease and misfortune knew no social bounds. Nor did the immensely dangerous business of childbirth"

"And secrets are dangerous. They start small but grow with every evasive answer or outright lie that protects them. Nevertheless, I confess to finding the closeness such conspiracy breeds irresistibly delicious."

"Knowledge cannot be unknown. Experience cannot be unlived."

"How much more tuneful are the birds of the woods than the birds of the water. Ducks and geese make their raucous racket without once finding a note of sweetness, whilst these tree dwellers are practiced in the art of melody."

"Who was it, I wonder, who decided that heartbroken relatives should host a party at the very moment all they wished for was to be left alone to grieve?"

"My mind is like the willow; it flexes and springs. My heart is a knot of oak. Let them try to wound me."

"It’s a brilliant example of a writer in total control of her material, apparently effortlessly inhabiting the minds of her characters and giving them wonderfully individual voices."

"fear it is written somewhere in the terms of my parental contract: Fret frequently about well-being of offspring."

"She needs the hand of friendship extended. Are we not all of us, at some time or another, dependent on the kindness of others? Would we not wish someone to act selflessly for our sake?"

"For whatever time we might have, my love. For whatever time we might have."

"After all, are we not measured by the way in which we treat the most vulnerable members of our society?"

"Slowly Tegan looked up and I saw wonderment on her face. It was of the variety only ever found in those young enough to yet have minds as open as the oceans and hearts longing to have proof of magic."

"Many in Batchcombe have suffered greatly, William. They look for someone to blame. It was my mother who made me see that.” She hesitated, then added, “People fear what they cannot explain."

"Must we always bedeck ourselves in prettiness to be thought pleasing? It would appear so. A woman must look a certain way to be worthy of a man’s attentions. It is expected."

"Non-English quotation."

"Book/Play1 (Book/Play1)"

"Book/Play2 (Book/Play2)"

"The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps."

"Let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers."

"People think it's terribly sad to spend Christmas alone, but it's no sadder, really, than spending any other day alone, is it?"

"I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts."

"It’s impossible to resist the kindness of strangers. Someone who looks at you, who doesn’t know you, who tells you it’s OK, whatever you did, whatever you’ve done: you suffered, you hurt, you deserve forgiveness."

"Some days I feel so bad that I have to drink; some days I feel so bad that I can’t."

"One doesn't just happen upon a belief that work must be meaningful, that our endeavours must be towards the well-being and betterment of our fellow human beings. It is something that is taught. And this college, is one of the places I learned that lesson."

"“This is a wonderful opportunity to be part of a team that has, over time, published with such great flair and innovation. I am excited to be joining Canongate and to have such an inspiring brief—to contribute to a list that reflects range, ambition, passion and a genuine belief in the power of writing to enrich and inform.”"

"“my kids joke that I’m going to die with a pencil in my hand”"

"Books are for pleasure and entertainment. For escape. They are also for information, discovery, guidance, discussion, debate and so much else besides"

"Books are about expressing ourselves as human beings, connecting with each other, telling our stories and imagining new worlds and new possibilities"

"As we begin a national conversation on our reading, writing and engagement with books, it seems fitting to provoke a discussion about the reasons we think books (and their authors) are important"

"The National Conversation is an invitation to join some of our country’s most talented thinkers as they explore the ways in which literature can have an impact on our lives, and to engage in finding solutions to the challenges facing writers and readers in our complex world. Beyond the questions we’ll ask is the real hope that this will indeed be a conversation about an art form that is as varied and dynamic as those who produce it. A conversation that includes any and all of us who have ever fallen into the pages of a book and found a place that felt like home"

"But I think that moving around absolutely has an impact. It’s your connection with language. I remember moving from one language to another as a child and finding it deeply traumatic. The fact that people who looked like me could not understand the language I was speaking had a big impact on me so when I first learnt how to speak English I had a very bad stutter"

"In the Midwest, the weather is extreme; when it is hot, it is very, very hot and when it is cold, it is very, very cold. All that had a very big impact on me and my mother says I did not speak for six months while I was figuring things out and when I did start speaking English I had a stutter"

"Nothing is a guilty pleasure. I am a big science fiction junkie. I love crime fiction. But sometimes you reach the decision that life is too short. I have so many hours left to me and there are other things I need to read"

"Sometimes I wish things had been done better but I try to switch off that side of my brain but you will know yourself, it is impossible to do that. And if I want to change too much then I will stop reading the book. I used to have a rule that I would finish every book I started but if it is not good enough I will stop because now I realise I have got limited reading time so it has to be really good"

"I would be terrified but you know, terror is not a reason not to do something infact that is a good reason to do something"

"A writer is going to write a novel and that writer may or may not only be from Uganda. I think too often when people are thinking about writers from the continent, there is this huge responsibility to produce some kind of great African book and that is nonsense. One writer writes one book that does or doesn’t succeed and that book will not necessarily be a Ugandan novel"

"People may say there is no reading culture but people always read newspapers, we are always in conversation and people spend money for example on locally produced DVDs in Nigeria. Making books affordable is the biggest thing because for example if someone produced pulp fiction that is written really well and was not costly, that would improve the reading culture"

"You can’t always change a government or stop the government from taking resources that should be dedicated to education but you can as editors work together to professionalise and set up standards and to attract all this to you"

"“Her work has a strong international focus and interest, particularly in relation to Africa where she is closely involved in the recognition and reward of creative literary talent and with the development of relevant skills.”"

"“I particularly valued her chairmanship of the last Prize Dinner, where her exceptional knowledge of African literature was strongly displayed, as was her deep friendship with her fellow authors. I look forward to reading more of her work.”"

"“Ellah is the best of the best when it comes to commissioning and editing. We are thrilled that she is joining Canongate. We need books that look beyond the horizon if we are to understand the challenging ways in which the world is changing, and those are the books that Ellah has found instinctively for more than two decades. I can’t wait to see which writers she champions first.”"

"... Where do the Neanderthals fit in? They take us way back beyond fingers tracing beasts on stone walls. While it's impossible to pinpoint the 'first' of their kind, they became a distinct population 450 to 400 thousand years ago (ka). The night sky then hanging over earth's many hominid populations would have been alien, our solar system light years away from its current position in a never-ending galactic waltz. Pause halfway through the Neanderthals' temporal dominion at around 120 ka, and while the land and rivers are mostly recognisable, the world feels different. It's warmer and ice melt-swollen oceans have flooded the land, shoving beaches many metres higher. Startlingly tropical beast roam even the great valleys of Northern Europe. In total, the Neanderthals endured for an astonishing 350,000 years, until we lose sight of them — or, at least their fossils and artifacts — somewhere around 40 ka."

"Neanderthals went through repeated cycles of cold conditions and then warm conditions where there were forests developing. ... When musk oxen turn up in the archaeological record, most of the time there are not Neanderthals."

"Neanderthals knew all sorts of landscapes and climates and different geographies. There is so much more to Neanderthals than the popular image of them ... I wanted to really try to share the way that archaeology is like a multi-disciplinary discipline and a lot of what we do actually is about world-building and how we look at the Neanderthals ... recreating the contextual world."

"Whatever your views on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – and there are many – [[George Galloway|[George] Galloway]]'s move is plainly an own goal (assuming his goal is to support Palestinians, rather than generate publicity for himself). One reason that many left-leaning Jews don't join the BDS movement is precisely because the boycott is perceived to be about rage against people, rather than an effective political tool. What's the best way to cement that belief? Announce you're avoiding Israelis as part of your commitment to BDS. Cue a flood of "told you sos" from those who say its all about punishing Israelis just for being who they are."

"Every British Jew has their own family story – of emigration and immigration, of threats and losses, but also of community and belonging. My own family’s journey to the UK from Iraq via Israel – two places fatefully touched by the influence of empire – may explain my own lack of shock at the callous, divisive and biased treatment of minority communities by the British political class, Labour included. Remembering Britain's history is not an excuse for today's politicians, or a minimisation of the real and noxious racism that still permeates our society. But it should be a reminder that for many in Britain, the experience of racism is still the norm and not the exception."

"[Following Boris Johnson's three days in intensive care with Covid-19 in spring 2020] A national leader in critical condition is an unsettling jolt, especially in the midst of an anxiety-drenched pandemic. But in Britain’s news media, the prime minister’s condition seemed to crowd out concern for others, and the exaltations of Mr. Johnson dampened scrutiny of his government’s failures."

"But Mr. Johnson had set a terrible example at work, breezily claiming he'd shaken hands with Covid-19 patients, crowding into Parliament and undermining health messages with his joshing delivery. Meanwhile, dozens of doctors and nurses were dying of the virus, among them several of the thousands who had answered the government call to come out of retirement to work in the N.H.S. during the pandemic. Reports emerged of staff members "bullied and shamed" into treating Covid-19 patients without the equipment needed to protect themselves, which the World Health Organization had warned in early February would be needed in vast supply."

"[[w:Noam Shuster-Eliassi|[Noam] Shuster]] worked with a women's health organisation in Rwanda before becoming a co-director of the Israel programme at Interpeace, a peacebuilding organisation set up by the UN. Shuster concentrated on a project working with Jewish settlers, the ultra-Orthodox and other groups either resistant to or excluded from standard peace camp initiatives. For Shuster, reaching out to such communities was a key part of conflict resolution, but the UN disbanded the project in 2017."

"She started writing jokes, in Hebrew, Arabic and English, trying to communicate the topics and ideas she had felt unable to broach within the confines of the peace industry. "You start with open mic slots, you bomb, you fall on your face a million times, you sharpen your material,” she says. But there was a receptive audience for a half-Iranian Israeli woman cracking jokes about the absurdities and injustices of Israel's decades-long military occupation."

"[On Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie] The film does make central an argument based on antisemitic conspiracy layered upon conspiracy. First, there is the idea that Jewish groups within Labour and in Britain are de facto pro-Israel fronts. Then, that such groups nefariously exerted outsized power – “orchestrating” the demise of a Labour leader, no less – and that Israel was pretty much behind all of this. Hence claims of Labour antisemitism were only ever false – indeed they are exclusively referred to as "smears" throughout the film’s narrative voiceover."

"We might also add, to those defending the film on the grounds that it features several Jewish voices, that this is a terrible fig leaf. Would we apply the same logic to people of colour dismissing the legitimacy of claims of anti-Black racism or Islamophobia? One would hope not."

"Proponents of the "smears" and #itwasascam narratives tend to see two oppositional camps: either you are a genuine socialist and sincerely committed to the Palestinian cause, or you are an anti-Corbyn liberal washout and advocate for Israel. This false dichotomy must be rejected outright."

"Everyone can, hopefully, agree that a connection to Israel should not make British Jews a target for antisemitism, which spikes every time that tensions in the region escalate. We might also agree not to infer that anyone with a "connection" to Israel automatically supports the state's violent policies towards the Palestinian people. But from there on, things get murky. One can passionately disagree with a British Jewish person’s appraisal of the Gaza war as "self-defence", but not be motivated by anti-Jewish hatred. One can be distressed by the apocalyptic images coming out of the Palestinian strip and wonder how anyone might justify such horrors, yet not be fuelled by antisemitism. But the different motivations lying behind criticism have been terribly conflated amid a fearful Jewish minority and its established leadership."

"Omnipresent on our screens, the redoubtable Shabi is one of the few Corbyn supporting commentators to be taken seriously by the media. Thoughtful and fluent, she deserves her massive rise in this year’s list."

"Shabi contends that the need to show a united front against the common enemy has meant that Israel has taken a long time to confront this discrimination [against Mizrahi Jews] and develop the equal opportunities so familiar to us in modern Britain. What is more, she argues, consigning the Mizrahi Jews to a lower status than Ashkenazi Jews has resulted in a huge missed opportunity for improving Israel's relations with its neighbours."

"Israel has changed radically since the days of its Ashkenazi founding fathers and mothers but Shabi's important book is nonetheless a wake-up call to modern Israeli society. For a nation to be able to call itself a true democracy, all of its citizens must feel equally enabled and valued."

"Pregnant with my first, I remember thinking I’d probably be having a boy, which I put down to inbuilt patriarchal bias – boys come first, in the sexist world that surrounds us. The baby was Rosie. Second time around, my expectation was that I’d have a boy this time, which was perhaps based on the law of probability; the new arrival was Elinor. Third time around, I was convinced I was having a boy, but the person who emerged was Miranda. And by the time I got to Catriona, I was absolutely certain I’d be having another girl – and I was."

"Eighty per cent of our newspapers are anti-PC. There is no area that is not up for discussion. I do not believe that people go around on their tiptoes afraid to offend women or ethnic minorities. But we have become worse at the exchange of ideas. We are not good any more at having really honest debates without upsetting people. We have become very good at abusive, hysterical exchanges and less good at intelligent debate. We do need to develop a healthy trade in ideas."

"Millions of people in the world – including in Hong Kong, Afghanistan, Uganda, Thailand, Egypt and Syria – are prepared to die for the vote and this dabbler is contemptuous of that right. Incidentally, Isis and al-Qaeda share that contempt. As for revolutions – has Brand ever experienced one?"

"It was my father’s dream that every child should be well-educated, well-fed and well-housed because he was a great believer that that was the equalizer of mankind. No matter what your background, no matter where you live or come from, if you have the opportunity of education, then you can become anything you want to become. And this was my father’s great dream and focus."

"His eyes burn like torches but he does not say a word. He looks at his mother with pity and clenches his small fists, thinking of Khetskel, of Shoshe, and of a way to escape. ("Shloyme")"

"The women had descended on the Lane like locusts, looking for bargains. ("Breaking the Fast")"

"She was standing over the candles and with both hands covering her face she had softly poured out her heart to God in heaven. ("Breaking the Fast")"

"Bill looked straight through the old man. His thoughts were very far away. ("Becoming a Tramp")"

"The baker's wife, who had been tut-tutting as her husband spoke, rejoined: "That's how they are. They don't know anything about compassion. For them, if you have money, you're lucky. If you don't, you can start digging your own grave. ("Becoming a Tramp")"

"People make their way through the library like a dense forest, not knowing where it begins or where it will end. ("Two Libraries")"

"The teacher is still basking in the beauty of his own creativity, when he realises that his only listeners are the walls. ("Two Libraries")"

"The small house stands on its own, completely isolated. The houses on either side have been reduced to high piles of burned, crumbling bricks, broken, rickety furniture, and the charred remains of enormous black beams. All kinds of tools and appliances are lying around amidst endless mountains of broken glass. Inside the house, destruction weaves its silent web, just like the cobwebs appearing between the flowers and the grasses, which have sprung up wild and free among the ruins. (first lines of "She is Not Blind")"

"Satisfied, filled with the warmth of the bright sun, the birds were singing cheerfully, oblivious of the war taking over the world. ("Blitz")"

"And there it was, in the ruined street, among the piles of bricks, earth, bent metal joists and glass, and the smoke and smouldering fires which the firemen had not yet managed to extinguish: the high-pitched, regular ticking of their office clock. It was still hanging on the one remaining wall, which was covered in black smoke. It ticked monotonously, vibrating slightly, like the only soul left living in a cemetery."

"The earth lay there like a corpse prepared for an autopsy, its innards wet and glistening. Sewage pipes were sticking out everywhere, like intestines falling out of an open belly."

"Bella was lying in her narrow, child's bed. She listened to the roaring Nazi aeroplanes and to the dull, faraway explosions and gunfire, which became increasingly clear as the planes came nearer. She heard the whistling sound of the bombs, which by now were coming down almost onto her own roof. As they fell, some of them wept like little children, others howled like mad dogs. She could see the flames through the window, rising up to the sky. Then another fire exploded in the blazing sky with such force it was as if somebody had poured a barrel of petrol onto a burning building. It lit up her girlish bedroom and the bed she was lying in."

"The alleyway exuded an air of Yom Kippur - beautiful, sad and eerily quiet."

"The air downstairs in the cellar was grey and foggy. It smelled of mould and the chill of graves."

"The small front garden was ablaze with colours and bursting with birdsong. The bright flowers of late summer were talking to each other intimately in their own, wordless language."

"It was the Sabbath. And even the wind and the snow rested from their labours. (first lines)"

"Hannah's words had pricked her like a needle. (Chapter III, p35)"

"Sometimes, however, even the poems failed her, her harrowed mind would not be soothed, and then she would run out of the home and post herself in the gateway of the house. Or she would lean up against a lamp-post which stood a few yards away and which had not been lit up for years, and she would watch the children at play, gaze after the passers-by who came and went, intent on their trivial tasks, completely absorbed in their humdrum, humble lives. Healthy-minded people. They got on with their work stead-fastly, and it never entered their minds to ask what was it all about? What did they live for? Why? Why? (Chapter VI, p98)"

""So there's no lack of poverty anywhere-not even in Warsaw! Ah, well, you'll find plenty of misery everywhere..." (Chapter VIII, p150)"

"The festive season was over, and this was the time of year when an old folk song haunted the air in town and village an old familiar melody that evoked a smile here and a sigh there: "Father, my Father, winter is drawing near, And Father, O Father, a Jew should know no fear, But look, O look, the snow is falling fast, And hark, O hark, at the spiteful wintry blast. See, there goes my roof, the water's coming through, Hurry, Father, hurry, send succour to a poor old Jew!""

"In modern Yiddish writing, the moral, spiritual, and emotional capital of generations of Jewish women was utilized by male and female writers alike...Female prose writers, such as Fradl Shtok, Esther Kreitman, Rokhl Korn, Kadia Molodowsky, and Khava Rosenfarb, also deepened the awareness and understanding of the feminine contribution to Jewish civilization."

"As the only female writer in what many consider the most singular family in the history of Yiddish literature, Esther Kreitman and her small literary output have been overshadowed by the voluminous works of her brothers I.J. and I.B. Singer. Her notable contribution to Yiddish literature, unheralded in her lifetime, was to write in Yiddish in support of the haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) from a female perspective, an achievement made all the more remarkable by her lifelong struggle with depression and perhaps other undiagnosed emotional and physical illnesses which disrupted her ability to write. Her ruthless depictions of women’s place in hasidic society remain as painful as fresh wounds. In her autobiographical novel Der Sheydim Tants (Deborah) she wrote: “In his heart of hearts, Reb Avram Ber disapproved of his wife’s erudition. He thought it wrong for a woman to know too much, and was determined that this mistake should not be repeated in Deborah’s case. Now there was in the house a copy of Naimonovitch’s Russian Grammar, which Deborah always studied in her spare moments, but whenever her father caught her at this mischief he would hide the book away on top of the tiled stove out of her reach, and then she would have to risk her very life to recover it.”"

"Esther Singer Kreitman was called many things in her lifetime: unattractive, household drudge, hysteric, epileptic, madwoman, controlling mother, a woman possessed by a dybbuk. These were the words—or epithets—her family used. Less often used were the words that should have been associated with her: novelist, short story writer, translator."

"We’re all different and I think it’s important to do what’s best for you."

"For many, agriculture can represent deep pain because of the history of slavery, but also because of current land loss, forced migration and oppressive farm labor practices. But I remember thinking, “Could this be enough to keep us from picking up the plow again?” I think, for some people, possibly it is. But I’d like to think we recognize that our legacy with the land is so much more than that"

"I’d like to see African America lifting up our black farmers, chefs and community food leaders. Our priorities need to be putting our dollars directly into our communities so that black farmer and that black-owned restaurant can keep their doors open, allowing them to keep feeding our communities and keep food culture alive. We need to get better at telling our stories to make that connection with our community."

"I want to say that Africa’s history and brilliance is there, and I want to say that Black people can be magical and fantastical creatures, as well as anything else."

"As there were more books coming on the scene, there tended to be less about Black people as magical beings or creatures in fantasy, and I definitely wanted to see more of that"

"Enslaved Africans refused to be stripped of their spirituality, their stories, and in essence, their humanity, and so they took them with them. You can see these connections across the diaspora, from similar tales, a Yoruba speaking community in Colombia, to the deities worshipped in the Caribbean and beyond. Even when it came to religion, Africans showed ingenuity and tenacity in holding onto what mattered to them."

"I think it’s very important to show Black characters as main characters and to chart their journeys of vulnerability and strength. That was another major highlight of writing this novel."

"Mo gbà yín. Ní àpéjọ, àpéjọ yóò rí ìbùkún àpéjẹ̀ẹ Ìyá Yemoja tí yóo ṣe àpéjọ̀rùn ìrìn àjò àpéjẹ. Kí Olodumare mú ọ dé ilé ní àìléwu àti àláfíà,’ I say, and then repeat the prayer that will glean the woman’s soul. ‘I welcome you. Gathered, you will be blessed by Mother Yemoja, who will ease your journey. May Olodumare take you home to safety and peace. Come forth.’”"

"“‘It’s just…’ But the words won’t come and instead I find myself saying nothing, trying to keep my lips from trembling. The sapphire is cool in my grip as I look down at it, remembering the woman. Folasade floats nearer as my hair waves in front of us. ‘May I?’ she asks. Nodding, I let Folasade sweep my curls away so that we can see each other’s faces clearly. Her eyes are almost black in the water, but they shine with a reverence I know is missing from mine.”"

"Living in Zaire from its neighbor, Congo-Brazzaville. The tower was a medley of gleaming metal tubes and concrete pillars, and its raison d’être was a bit of a mystery: It wasn't particularly beautiful, had been left unfinished for decades, and couldn't be visited. That ambiguity was fitting. The Limete Tower, as it was called, was an exercise in presidential hypocrisy, and a half-hearted one at that. Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire's long-ruling dictator, had commissioned it to commemorate his former boss and onetime friend Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of independent Congo. Lumumba was assassinated in January 1961 with the collusion of Western powers worried about his suspected Communist sympathies and determined to keep him from power. In theory, the monument was meant to glorify a national hero, a martyr to imperialism. But the gesture's sincerity was open to question, because Mobutu himself helped ensure Lumumba's death, ordering him to be flown handcuffed to a secessionist province where he was shot by firing squad, his body then dismembered and dissolved in acid."

"I don’t want to write trauma for trauma’s sake. I want to write it in a way that leads to empathy. To action."

"It is so critical to understand that speaking up transcends the ability to help just the person speaking up, but knowing that whenever we use our voices, we are doing so for many others who have suffered the same experiences or injustices. It is about starting crucial conversations that would hopefully lead to positive change. It is about refusing to be complacent, to accept what is seen as the norm."

"It’s so heartbreaking that we’re killing talent. We’re killing intelligence. We’re killing future leaders. We’re killing brains, inventors. We’re killing so much by not allowing these girls to be educated."

"When you get up every day, I want you to remind yourself that tomorrow will be better than today. That you are a person of value. That you are important."

"You must do good for other peoples, even if you are not well, even if the whole world around you is not well."

"We all be speaking different because we all are having different growing-up life, but we can all be understanding each other if we just take the time to listen well."

"Not his-story. My own will be called her-story."

"“My mama say education will give me a voice. I want more than just a voice, Ms. Tia. I want a louding voice,” I say. “I want to enter a room and people will hear me even before I open my mouth to be speaking. I want to live in this life and help many people so that when I grow old and die, I will still be living through the people I am helping.“"

"I want to tell her that God is not a cement building of stones and sand. That God is not for all that putting inside a house and locking Him there. I want her to know that the only way to know if a person find God and keep Him in their heart is to check how the person is treating other people, if he treats people like Jesus says--with love, patience, kindness, and forgiveness."

"Now I know that speaking good English is not the measure of intelligent mind and sharp brain. English is only a language, like Yoruba and Igbo and Hausa. Nothing about it is so special, nothing about it makes anybody have sense."

"Who knows what else tomorrow will bring? So, I nod my head yes, because it is true, the future is always working, always busy unfolding better things, and even if it doesn’t seem so sometimes, we have hope of it."

"“Your schooling is your voice, child. It will be speaking for you even if you didn’t open your mouth to talk. It will be speaking till the day God is calling you come.” That day, I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t just want to be having any kind voice . . . I want a louding voice."

"I feel a free that I didn't feel in long time. And when I smile, it climb from inside my stomach and spread itself on my teeth."

"If it takes two people to make a baby, why only one person, the woman, is suffering when the baby is not coming? Is it because she is the one with breast and the stomach for being pregnant? Or because of what? I want to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than men?"

"Write your truth, Ms. Tia say. Your truth."

"“Your dead mother and me, we are age-mates. God forbid for me to share my husband with my own child. God forbid that I am waiting for you to finish with my husband before I can enter his room. Ah, you will suffer in this house. Ask Khadija, she will tell you that I am a wicked woman. That my madness is not having cure.”"

"“When you begin to born your children, you will not be too sad again,” she say. “When I first marry Morufu, I didn’t want to born children. I was too afraid of having a baby so quick, afraid of falling sick from the load of it. So I take something, a medicine, to stop the pregnant from coming. But after two months, I say to myself, ‘Khadija, if you don’t born a baby, Morufu will send you back to your father’s house.’ So I stop the medicine and soon I born my first girl, Alafia. When I hold her in my hands for the first time, my heart was full of so much love. Now, my children make me laugh when I am not even thinking to laugh. Children are joy, Adunni. Real joy.”"

"She open her eyes, give me a sad smile. “I wish I am a man, but I am not, so I do the next thing I can do. I marry a man.”"

"I am leaving Ikati. This is what I been wanting all my life, to leave this place and see what the world outside is looking like, but not like this. Not with a bad name following me. Not like a person that the whole village is looking for because they think she have kill a woman. Not with one half of my heart with Kayus and the other half with Khadija. I hang my head down, feeling a thick, heavy cloth as it is covering me. The thick cloth of shame, of sorrow, of heart pain."

"When she come out, she draw deep breath and her chest, wide like blackboard, is climbing up and down, up and down. It is as if this woman is using her nostrils to be collecting all the heating from the outside and making us to be catching cold. I am standing beside Mr. Kola, and his body is shaking like my own. Even the trees in the compound, the yellow, pink, blue flowers in the long flowerpot, all of them too are shaking."

"I didn’t tell Ms. Tia that I ever marry Morufu or about all the things he did to me in the room after he drink Fire-Cracker. I didn’t tell her about what happen to Khadija. I didn’t tell her because I have to keep it inside one box in my mind, lock the box, and throw the key inside river of my soul. Maybe one day, I will swim inside the river, find the key."

"I tear to pieces the paper, and throw it to the floor. Then I swim deep inside the river of my soul, find the key from where it is sitting, full of rust, at the bottom of the river, and open the lock. I kneel down beside my bed, close my eyes, turn myself into a cup, and pour the memory out of me."

"“Fifteen years ago, I was selling cheap materials from my boot, going from place to place, looking for customers. I wasn’t born into wealth. I have worked hard for my success. I fought for it. It wasn’t easy, especially because my husband, Chief, he didn’t have a job. If you want to be like me in business, Adunni, you will need to work very hard. Rise about whatever life throws at you. And never, ever give up on your dreams. Do you understand?”"

"But there are words in my head, many things I want to say. I want to tell Ms. Tia I am sorry I made her come here. I want to ask why the doctor didn’t come too. Why didn’t he come and get a beating like his wife? If it takes two people to make a baby, why only one person, the woman, is suffering when the baby is not coming? Is it because she is the one with breast and the stomach for being pregnant? Or because of what? I want to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than the men?"

"Trees, they die dead like people too. They need care too. The earth around us needs care. We come from earth, we eat from earth, and one day we must go back to earth, so why are we treating it so bad?"

"Kike picks up her basket, sets it on her head, leaves it to balance by itself. The girls in our village learn how to do this from when they are first growing two teeth. They know how to use every part of their body to work so that their hand can be free to do even more work."

"“In our land, a sad wife is better than a happy woman with no husband.”"

"That’s the disgusting reality about the human ability to adapt. At first the shock, the repulsion, is all in 3D — sights and sounds and smells. You recoil and gag and wish for a bath and cry at the devastation. Time passes. You live in it. You spend time in it. You blend, and everything fizzles to normalcy, and that which once repulsed slowly becomes natural, acceptable if you do nothing. That, I realize, is what culture is: doing things a certain way until you get used to it."

"“But you were blind to your wife’s depression and silent resentment. She hid it from you because she loved you. And you were blind to it because society offers you that blindfold, that thick cloth of entitlement, patriarchy, at birth.”"

"But science fiction’s entanglement with theology goes far deeper... Writers in this genre explore the consequences of technological innovation for human communities and individual human lives, whether those consequences are intentional or accidental, emotional or economic. They consider the impact that scientific theories and concepts have had on our understandings of what it means to be human, and on the limits of individual human identity. They examine how the characteristics that make us human (big brains, tool-making hands) might also lead to the end of humanity, either with a bang (“Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines”) or a whimper (“Day of the Triffids”) or both (“Threads,” “The Day After”). As such, science fiction asks its audiences not just who they think they are, but who they want to be. It creates visions both of the world as it could be and as it must not be allowed to be, with science and technology together building the future of faith."

"Theology and science have got a lot in common. For one thing, they’re often considered too hard, or too abstract, for ordinary people to understand. Their study is — apparently — reserved to those rare brains who can understand the complexity of the natural or social world. Ordinary people can only begin to understand a simplified version of these subjects. But despite this stereotype, both subjects also form part of our common human heritage, helping us to ask and answer key questions about what makes up the world around us, as well as how and why it works. (2022)"

"Every time we think about the past, we rewrite history as part of bringing a moral order to the present. (2021)"

"Planning a good menu demands experience, a certain amount of knowledge and a good deal of thought. I'm only half-joking when I say that learning how to order well in Chinese restaurants is one of my life's proudest achievements."

"But the fact remains that you can't fully appreciate Chinese gastronomy without sharing in the pleasures of the quite, the plain, the qingdan as well as the sweet and sour and spicy. Plain dishes are like the empty space that frames and highlights a work of art, They are the necessary corrective to the wild excitements of flavour, restoring physical balance and mental equanimity."

"Like many Chinese people, particularly those of the older generation, she didn't show her love for me by hugging or soliciting emotional outpourings, but through food and fussing."

"In other words, we can – and to survive, we must – transform and even end within the next ten years the failed system of capitalism that now threatens to collapse earth’s life support systems and with them, human civilisation. We must replace that economic system with one that respects boundaries and limits; one that nurtures ‘soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity’;6 one that delivers social and economic justice."

"The reality is that, today, all states are embedded in, governed by and subject to the international system of mobile, volatile, private financial markets – a system that has indebted and impoverished the many and raised political tensions, as reflected in the rise of nationalism. Millions of voters understand the nature of globalization, even while dimly aware of the monetary, fiscal or trade theories on which the system is built. This public awareness explains why some electorates have backed the election of “strong men” – politicians who offer “protection” from the very global markets that have stripped economies of jobs and income, while enriching rentier capitalists."

"Social democracy’s blind spot for the international financial architecture and its power over domestic policy-making has had other consequences. Not only does neglect of the international system let globalized capital markets off the regulatory hook, but globalization has also led to the rise of economic nationalisms."

"Globalization represents the tragic reversal of all that Keynes hoped to achieve at Bretton Woods: an international framework that would end nationalisms, international trade competition, high levels of domestic unemployment, low levels of aggregate demand and the consequent debt deflation. It was an attempt by Keynes and other economists to prevent the return of nationalisms and fascism by developing policies that increased domestic demand not by boosting exports and raising demand externally but by raising living standards at home: an inter-national system that would restore policy autonomy to democratic states and stability to the world’s economies."

"Mister, I’m not for sale,’ I say. ‘Never was, never have been, never will be.’ ‘Everyone has a price, young lady.’ ‘What’s yours?’ I reply."

"Outnumbered and outmanoeuvred by fools! So be it. On one condition – the minute your eggs start to unscramble, the three of you are going to say loud and clear, under my direction: ‘Cobra told us not to do this, but did we listen? Hell no!ʼ"

"While teaching again, Brown soon realised that the same racism that she had fought in her home country was also prevalent in the UK. This was the awakening of a new goal – to fight the racism, sexism, and classism that was deeply entrenched in the British education system and wider society."

"So many of us have loved her dearly, been inspired by her virtues, benefited from her friendship, kindness and generosity, and regarded her as a trailblazer in so many things – her stand against apartheid, racism and injustice of all kinds; her service to education and gender rights; her compassion for humanity. She is in our hearts and thoughts and will be remembered as a fine human being as a very dear friend."

"Babette Brown came to the UK after she was forced into political exile due to her opposition to Apartheid. The author of several books on early learning and child development, at the age of 70, she went on to found Persona Dolls, making dolls of many different ethnicities and types, who would tell their stories through a teacher. Children were then encouraged to offer advice and solutions to the experiences a doll describes. This practical and non-threatening approach to dealing with difficult issues has proved especially effective with children. Her charity, established in the 2000s, produce the dolls in South Africa. Thousands of teachers globally are now trained to use the Persona Dolls approach."

"Although she didn’t win we were very satisfied, simply with the nomination, and we happily relaxed with another glass of wine content that Babette would have been so proud that her anti-racist work with young children, through Persona Doll Training, was being acknowledged.""

""Just as the nominations for all the categories were finished to our utter astonishment Babette’s face filled the screen again and it was announced that she had WON a special CHAIRMAN’S AWARD for her work with Persona Doll Training. Shocked, my brother, Peter Brown and I approached the stage to collect her award."

"(How much in your books comes from personal experience?) RHYS: If you experience a thing you know you can write it so much more, but life's one thing, a book's another."

"It's a lovely feeling to know you can do exactly as you like."

"The things you remember have no form. When you write about them, you have to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. To give life shape—that is what a writer does. That is what is so difficult."

"I've noticed that. They believe the lies far more than they believe the truth."

"When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all. I've never written when I was happy. I didn't want to. But I've never had a long period of being happy. 'Do you think think anyone has? I think you can be peaceful for a long time. When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write. You see, there's very little invention in my books. What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down. I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes."

"I suppose the fantastic is what you imagine, but as soon as you do a fantastic thing, it's no longer fantastic, it becomes real."

"One is born either to go with or to go against."

"She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion. ("The Insect World")"

"Ash had fallen. Perhaps it had fallen the night before or perhaps it was still falling. I can only remember in patches. I was looking at it two feet deep on the flat roof outside my bedroom. The ash and the silence. Nobody talked in the street, nobody talked while we ate, or hardly at all. I know now that they were all frightened. They thought our volcano was going up. (beginning of "Heat")"

"There is no control over memory. Quite soon you find yourself being vague about an event which seemed so important at the time that you thought you'd never forget it. Or unable to recall the face of someone whom you could have sworn was there for ever. On the other hand, trivial and meaningless memories may stay with you for life. I can still shut my eyes and see Victoria grinding coffee on the pantry steps, the glass bookcase and the books in it, my father's pipe-rack, the leaves of the sandbox tree, the wallpaper of the bedroom in some shabby hotel, the hairdresser in Antibes. It's in this way that I remember buying the pink milanese silk underclothes, the assistant who sold them to me and coming into the street holding the parcel. (beginning of "On Not Shooting Sitting Birds")"

"One October afternoon Mrs Baker was having tea with Miss Verney and talking about the proposed broiler factory in the middle of the village where they both lived. Miss Verney, who had not been listening attentively, said, 'You know Letty, I've been thinking a great deal about death lately. I hardly ever do, strangely enough.' (beginning of the story "Sleep It Off, Lady")"

"He was intimately acquainted with the police of three countries, and he sat alone in a small restaurant not far from the Boulevard Montparnasse sipping an apéritif moodily, for he disliked Montparnasse and detested solitude. He had left his native Montmartre to dine with a lady and had arrived twenty minutes late. She was not of those usually kept waiting and she had already departed. 'Sacré Floriane', muttered the Chevalier. He looked at a Swedish couple at the next table, at the bald American by the door, and at the hairy Anglo-Saxon novelist in the corner, and thought that they were a strange-looking lot, and exceedingly depressing. (Quelles gueules qu'ils ont, was how he put it.)..."

"...there is peace in despair in exactly the same way as there is despair in peace ("Outside the Machine")"

"...What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. ("Till September Petronella")"

"'Mein Lieb, Mon Cher, My Dear, Amigo,' the letter began (beginning of the story "Tigers Are Better-looking")"

"They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, ‘because she pretty like pretty self’ Christophine said. (first lines)"

"I thought if I told no one it might not be true."

"I woke the next morning knowing that nothing would be the same. It would change and go on changing."

"So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse. (first lines)"

"I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds — with God's help I catch some."

"She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it."

"It was a beautiful place - wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd find myself thinking, 'What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing'."

"Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow."

""...Money have pretty face for everybody, but for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else."

"'Quite like old times,' the room says. 'Yes? No?' There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in flight of steps. What they call an impasse. I have been here five days. I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life."

"I...think about being hungry, being cold, being hurt, being ridiculed, as if it were in another life than this. This damned room - it's saturated with the past. . . .It's all the rooms I've ever slept in, all the streets I've ever walked in. Now the whole thing moves in an ordered, undulating procession past my eyes. Rooms, streets, streets, rooms. . . ."

"It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy. (first lines of Part One)"

"I don't know how people live when they know exactly what's going to happen to them each day. (Part One, 7th section)"

"...There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world. (Part One, 9th section)"

"It's funny when you feel as if you don't want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else to lie without moving. That's when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running. (Part two, 1st section)"

"She seemed to be contemplating a future at once monotonous and insecure with an indifference which was after all a sort of hard-won courage. (chapter 3)"

"It was the darkness that got you. It was heavy darkness, greasy and compelling. It made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt like you could not breathe. (chapter 3)"

""It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong." (chapter 4)"

"She said 'darling' with her lips, but her heart was dead. (chapter 5)"

"When you were nineteen, and it was the first time you had been let down, you did not make scenes. You felt as if your back was broken, as if you would never move again. But you did not make a scene. That started later on, when the same thing had happened five or six times over, and you were supposed to be getting used to it. (chapter 6)"

"The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first? (chapter 12)"

"When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul. (chapter 12)"

"'They touch life with gloves on. They're pretending about something all the time. Pretending quite nice and decent things, of course. But still...' 'Everybody pretends,' Marya was thinking..."

"She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child. You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you."

"no good ever comes from being too polite. (p40)"

"They sat at a corner table in the little restaurant, eating with gusto and noise after the manner of simple-hearted people who like their neighbours to see and know their pleasures. (beginning of "Trio")"

"One of those cold, heavy days in spring - a hard sky with a glare behind the cloud, all the new green of the trees hanging still and sullen. (beginning of "The Grey Day")"

"Funny how it's slipped away, Vienna. Nothing left but a few snapshots. (beginning of "Vienne")"

"the search for illusion a craving, almost a vice, the stolen waters and the bread eaten in secret of [her] life. ("Illusion")"

"It was obvious that this was not an Anglo-Saxon: he was too gay, too dirty, too unreserved and in his little eyes was such a mellow comprehension of all the sins and the delights of life. He was drinking rapidly one glass of beer after another, smoking a long, curved pipe, and beaming contentedly on the world. The woman with him wore a black coat and skirt; she had her back to us. I said: 'Who's the happy man in the corner? I've never seen him before.'"

"One shuts one's eyes and sees it written: red letters on a black ground: Le Saut dans l'Inconnu. . . . Le Saut... Stupidly I think: But why in French? Of course it must be a phrase I have read somewhere. Idiotic. I screw up my eyes wildly to get rid of it: next moment it is back again. Red letters on a black ground. One lies staring at the exact shape of the S."

"I wonder too if I am terribly excited about something that has been done ages ago (1964)"

"Very few people change after well say seven or seventeen. Not really. They get more this or more that and of course look a bit different. But inside they are the same. (1955)"

"I don't believe in the individual Writer so much as in Writing. It uses you and throws you away when you are not useful any longer. But it does not do this until you are useless and quite useless too. Meanwhile there is nothing to do but plod along line by line. (1953)"

"Everyone does seem very pessimistic about the future of writing and art in general. But hasn't it always been a fight? I remember how very bitter most of the English in Paris were about that very subject ages ago. (1953)"

"I usually dislike my books, sometimes, don't want to touch them. But the Next One will be a bit better. I am always excited and forget all failures and all else. (1953)"

"Writing can be (among other things), a safety valve. (1949)"

"I like emotion, I approve of it-in fact am capable of wallowing in it. (1946)"

"I think that the Anglo-Saxon idea that you can be rude with impunity to any female who has written a book is utterly damnable. You come and have a look out of curiosity and then allow the freak to see what you think of her. It's only done to the more or less unsuccessful and only by Anglo-Saxons. Well... if it were my last breath I'd say HELL TO IT and to the people who do it- (1936)"

"You see I don't even know myself and am really trying to argue it out with myself - anyway it isn't very important. (1934)"

"I am always being told that until my work ceases being "sordid and depressing" I haven't much chance of selling. (1931)"

"When I moved to Scotland, I discovered Jean Rhys, and she became a haunting influence on my work...As in the case of Jean Rhys, writers who moved to Britain in their youth struck a special chord with me as outsiders grappling with issues similar to my own—Abdulrazak Gurnah, Buchi Emecheta, Ahdaf Soueif."

"It was in the States that I saw my first ever copy of Jean Rhys. It was her book, Voyage in the Dark. It was the simplicity and beauty of the prose that I loved. But it was a horrible book, really, for a young girl to read. Jean Rhys felt she was a victim. I tried to tell her that. I only met her once, in London, with her husband. Her style was so pure but she wrote about impure things."

"of the five collected novels, the one that hit home the hardest was Voyage in the Dark. Reading it was a painful voyage into my own cluelessness and powerlessness, a voyage that many young women of my generation, on the cusp of the women's movement, had embarked upon...Rhys's portrayals of young women who fall prey to rapacious situations, canaries in the mine shaft of patriarchy, smart girls with nowhere to go but the wrong man's arms or Anna Karenina's train tracks, spoke to many of us embarking on our journeys...by allowing her female characters a full range of feelings and not airbrushing them into simple virtuous victimhood, Rhys liberates us all from the danger of a single, monochrome self and story...That ability to imagine a life so intimately and richly is Jean Rhys's gift to us. For that she should have been knighted. Instead, I'd like to imagine her even rather happy (perhaps!) with what her stories have become: food to nourish all our souls."

"I admire Jean Rhys, especially Wide Sargasso Sea, but she is too limited by her pathology."

"A reader new to Rhys usually puzzles over her viewpoint looking both ways across the channel and the Atlantic, she seems for and against both perspectives. Her insider-outsider's treatment of England, France and the Caribbean gnaws at comfortable ethnocentricisms.... Looking for some kind of familiar ground, the reader tries to fit Rhys into available models of contemporary fiction, and fails. She belongs to no recognizable school, fits into no ready-made slot. Rhys's fiction belongs, as she did, to worlds whose mutual understanding has "the feeling...of... things that... couldn't fit together." The dissonances of seemingly different worlds inform the Rhysian novel, finding coherence in her art...All her work is charged with a sense of belonging in many wheres at once."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."

"Jean Rhys maddens me because she's got this wonderful art-deco prose style, and all it does is paint the same picture of the thwarted woman who's got out of an unbearable relationship but who sees nothing before her except the possibility of another unbearable relationship which she'll be in just as long as she can bear it, and then she'll be back sitting in the corner of this cafe with some single glass of absinthe that she has to make last for four hours because she can only afford one glass. This is after leaving Mr. Mackenzie and before meeting Mr. Somebody Else. I think, "Oh, Jean, for God's sake" - this is so empty and so self-regarding, an exquisite piece of nothing. Just paper cutouts."

"...Jean Rhys, I think, wrote the best West Indian novel...Wide Sargasso Sea."

"Wide Sargasso Sea has 190 pages of words, and each one was weighed and considered in relation to every other in a way that I have never seen except in a poem. It is a poem, and, to paraphrase its author, all her life was in it. How much this is literally true can be seen from her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (1979). From the portrait of her mother and their antagonistic relationship, to her descriptions of Black people, and her own feelings of being an outcast among white and Black, even to the vegetation, the parrot, the patchwork quilt-the West Indian terrain of Wide Sargasso Sea is shown to be drawn from her own life there. Ms. Rhys, from childhood in the West Indies and adulthood in Europe, had many scores to settle and her creation of Antoinette was for the purpose of settling them. She wanted to burn down all that Rochester symbolized on her own behalf as a West Indian woman, and she wanted us to know. In the original Brontë story of Jane Eyre, the first Mrs. Rochester's maiden name was Mason. Ms. Rhys gives Antoinette another name so that both her mother and father are Creole and the European Mason is the stepfather. The name she gives her is Cosway or causeway, the bridge between the Third World and Europe, between one race and another, a causeway from defeat to victory. I believe it is a triumph for us as women, for all of us as citizens of the world."

"No one captured epic sadness as well as Jean Rhys, and none of her books captured it as unapologetically as Good Morning, Midnight"

"Miss Rhys's work seems to me to be so very good, so vivid, so extraordinarily distinguished by the rendering of passion, and so true, that I wish to be connected with it."

"somebody who has confirmed my vision of literature is Jean Rhys...when I read Jean Rhys’s first novel, I never imagined that she was inventing. It fascinated me, I liked it because she breaks with the vision of woman in literature as a docile, noble creature, influenced by her family and everything. I read all of her works, and I thought that I knew her very well, until I finally realized that she had invented herself completely, so much so that she forbade them to write her biography because she didn’t want the public to see that she was different from the protagonists she had created. I was very pleased because I felt that rather than being a strange phenomenon I was somebody connected to another writer in a different country."

"That fire you lit our beacon to safe harbour in the islands."

"...Jean Rhys or Octavia Butler, lady writers much loved but rarely copied. There's too much freedom in them."

"...she was very serious about writing. She was a funny woman, and very vain and coquettish about her appearance...she was a very truthful person...She had a far more interesting life than appears in those unfinished memoirs."

"Creating a lifelong love of learning was Mason’s goal. If children developed an early hunger for ideas, she reasoned, it would sustain them through life. Mason’s philosophy was that in addition to the proper nutrients needed to thrive, children require ideas to chew on, to properly grow. And the source of these ideas, she reasoned, was not typical textbooks. Rather than suggesting that these ideas originate in the mind of the teacher, administrator, or even the parent, Mason believed that the best resource for these ideas were books of “literary quality” or great books."

"As for , we are in a really good place now because we are acknowledging more and more how unfair the business has been in the past. There were really strong male voices at the forefront and now it seems like we are making room at the table for other people, and writers from places we never really allowed into the . That incorporates race and gender and , and class as well, so we are seeing people writing nature who we didn’t get to see before. We see mothers who just get an hour a day to write and they send off to a contest and they win and black writers and BIPOC writers who are writing and being recognized for their work. In the natural world we are all on the same level but that hasn’t happened in the publishing world. Seeing things change gives me such joy."

"In old , butterflies were the souls of the dead and it was unlucky to harm one. The , however, was thought to be the devil and was persecuted. The idea of the butterfly as the embodiment of the soul implies their ability to cross into the . My ancestors often saw no boundary at all between wild places and that Otherworld which we cannot see."

"On the morning of my thirty-fifth birthday, I woke up to an ' newspaper article entitled 'Mass extinction of species is happening in Ireland'. The article stated that a third of the species groups examined are threatened with extinction, predominantly due to , , and . A number of species are, in fact, , and without urgent action being taken immediately, they will simply disappear entirely from this island. That morning, I spent so many hours researching what we have already lost — what we risk losing any day — that I nearly wept with the sadness of it all. Some of those creatures in most danger are the , the , the , the bumblebee, the , the and the ."

"... Cacophony of Bone is a record of days, a meditation on the passing of time, and a deep noticing of the world around us—trees, moths, birds, water, and the comfort of animals. ... Cacophony of Bone revisits similar topics from ní Dochartaigh’s first memoir, Thin Places, but with a new perspective—of sobriety, finding a partner to share life with, a home she may stay at longer than any other place, and the new longing to become a mother."

"For most of the , tree cover is the normal condition. Any area below the five hundred metre contour that is left to itself and protected from vandalism, or other biotic factors, will revert to forest unless exposed to high s or ."

"... the spread of urban conditions constitutes a terrible threat until we have learned to appreciate the real necessity for in the surroundings at every stage of human life. We must realize, in all its implications, the truth that , and the full development of intellectual or spiritual life, no less than mere existence, requires contact with nature and natural beauty."

"In our soft too many s become oppressive, and we need a very carefully balanced combination of evergreen and deciduous planting to give us the right degree of comfort, variety and satisfaction. But with a brighter light and greater extremes of temperature, a much higher proportion of evergreen is felt to be right."

"Compare the appearance and social atmosphere of the average country village having a well-mixed community with those of a modern housing estate composed of all one type of house and garden. Monotony seems to make for squalor or genteel snobbery according to the class of house …"

"Brenda Colvin studied garden design at 1919–1920; set up her own practice in 1922; designed many gardens and estates, school grounds, university campus, cemeteries, also industrial landscapes, e.g. around power stations, and she published several books, including Land and Landscape ... When Colvin, together with , and others, co-founded the , she was a driving force in defining educational requirements. It seems, often Colvin first came up with the ideas (Annabel Downs, personal communication 2021). Colvin had travelled in the USA in 1931 and what she saw hugely influenced her later thinking (Gibson 2011, p. 35)."

"Karen has many privileges. She must learn not to take, always, the extra inch when the ell is so gladly granted."

"These insolent words, hurled at it, convulsed the livid face that fronted Karen. And suddenly, holding Karen's shoulders and leaning forward, Madame von Marwitz broke into tears, horrible tears—in all her life Karen had never pitied her as she pitied her then—sobbing with raking breaths: "No, no; it is too much. Have I not loved him with a saintly love, seeking to uplift what would draw me down? Has he not loved me? Has he not sought to be my lover? And he can spit upon me in the dust!""

"Her eyes came back to Karen's face and fury again seized her. "And as for you, ungrateful girl—perfidious, yes, and insolent one—you deserve to be denounced to the world.""