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Jan 2017

4^th January

[T]ights don’t bring me joy. But if I didn’t have any, that would bring me a lot of un-joy. Indeed, if I chucked out everything but joy-generating clothing, I would be left with one cardigan and I would have to stay in.

Zoe Williams, Did Marie Kondo's Spark bring me Joy? (2016), The Guardian, 2 Jan 2017

11^th January

[H]e did not hate people. He did not run after them - to that extent he was a solitary. But if they came his way and liked him and were the sort of people he liked being liked by he was gratified.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, TH White: A Biography (1967)

18^th January

[I]t will we hope be clear that not by any stretch of the too willing imagination could it be said that Robin was in love with Anne. Had that glorious passion filled his heart, he would not for a moment have considered his future wife’s happiness or convenience, being fatuously convinced that with HIM her life would at once become a bower of roses.

Angela Thirkell, Peace Breaks Out (1946)

25^th January

The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible but against their ideas of perfection, and as this book reminds you, perfection is a yardstick by which everything falls short.... The deeply engaged well know that the particular bit of legislation under discussion isn’t everything we hope for, doesn’t get us all the way there, and also know that it can be a step forward from which further steps can and must be taken, and that change is often made incrementally, not by a great leap from evil to pure goodness.

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Third Edition, with a new foreword and afterword (2016)

Feb 2017

1^st February

The humble omnibus. The humble omnibus may be thought by some readers too democratic a kind of conveyance to be considered in a book on Manners. Not at all! There are several reasons why it should have a place in such a volume.... A fine field for true courtesy.True courtesy, for instance, will prevent a man from infringing the rights of his neighbours on either side by occupying more than his own allotted space. The man who wants all the room. Very stout men are obliged to do so, but at least they need not spread out their knees in a way that is calculated to aggravate the evil. Nor need they arrange themselves in a comfortable oblique position, with the result of enhancing the inconvenience they must necessarily cause to those near them. Even a thin man can take up a quantity of room by thus disposing himself at an angle of forty-five with the other occupants of an omnibus.

Mrs CE Humphry ('Madge' of Truth), Manners for Men (1897)

8^th February

There’s so much pressure on women now to be sexy, to become educated, to have a fulfilling relationship. And - oh yes! - you also have to have children, and you’re supposed to be very happy when you’re doing all of this. It’s impossible. You don’t have to do everything. Just do a little bit at a time.

Annette Benning, Interview, The Observer, 5 Feb 2017

15^th February

[I]t was a hard lesson for a prince to learn. He was accustomed to command, and you cannot command yourself to know. Knowledge is granted; knowledge is gained; but it is not commanded.

Sarah Tolmie, The Stone Boatmen, (2014)

22^nd February

Don’t you see that the real truth about Truth is that he is not sober, but drunk - drunk as a lord? Wild, crazy, splendid, heroic, shameful, spectacular? Nothing more hideous, noble, lovely and absurd has ever been invented by the craziest lunatic than the things that are truly happening in this world at this moment?

Winifred Holtby, 'Truth is not Sober', in Truth is Not Sober and Other Stories (1934)

Mar 2017

1^st March

First of all, it's important to realize that the absence of formal prohibitions against committing art does not preclude the presence of powerful, informal ones.

Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983)

8^th March

This meaningless chatter about intuition is due to the duplicity of women. When one tells a fool something and the fool wants to know how one knows it, and one cannot be bothered explaining one's mental processes, one alludes mysteriously to 'feminine intuition'. It is a social ruse[.]

Rebecca West, 'The Nature of Woman: Every Home a Little Earlswood', review of The Nature of Woman by Dr Lionel Tayler, The Clarion, 7 Mar 1913, reprinted in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17 (edited by Jane Marcus) (1982)

15^th March

Bureaucracies almost by natire lack excitement, glamour, or charisma. We often live for fleeting intensities and charged moments, and celebrate marginality as a kind of permanent desideratum. But if bureaucracy and routinization have their costs, so do marginality and charisma. Marginality and momentary excitements are intrinsically fragile, evanescent, and unstable.

Gayle Rubin, 'Geologies of Queer Studies' (2004) in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (2011)

22^nd March

People like stories. Not as much as they like food or shelter, but a lot. And a good story is held together by one question: what happens next? It’s a question for the audience to ask and the storyteller to answer. It’s something an entertained audience wants to find out, not decide. There’s no suspense if the denouement is of your own devising.

David Mitchell, Choose my own Netflix adventure? No thanks, The Observer New Review 19 Mar 2017

29^th March

Jude had readily identified Gordon Blaine's type. He was the kind of man who would build up the difficulties of any task he was given and then apply his miraculous practical skills to succeed in delivering the impossible.

Simon Brett, The Strangling on the Stage (2013)

Apr 2017

5^th April

Overcoming evil with good does not often yield results in the short term, and it lacks all the special satisfactions of revenge.

Marilynne Robinson, 'Memory', in The Givenness of Things: essays (2015)

12^th April

Much has changed; much needs to change; being able to celebrate or at least recognize milestones and victories and keep working is what the times require of us.

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Third Edition, with a new foreword and afterword (2016)

19^th April

[I]t’s an increasingly frightening, chaotic, unknowable world and we can only control it (or make sense of it) in small, kindly, hopeful gestures. That’s what this ridiculous purchase was supposed to be. When it failed, I needed the person on the end of the phone to be kind and sympathetic and for the two of us to share a moment of fellow feeling. When that didn’t happen, it all seemed to represent something much bigger than itself. Something huge and helpless, to do with the world and everything that’s happening.

Victoria Coren Mitchell, I ordered 50 tiny tambourines. And then I wept, The Observer, 16 Apr 2017

26^th April

What we, the audience, take for magic, is often only technical expertise, and relatively small changes - sometimes, a single, subtle adjustment - can turn a play that has no spark at all into one that sets the theatre ablaze.

Nicholas Hytner: ‘I’ve always thought of theatre as a cure for loneliness’ , The Observer, 23 Apr 2017

May 2017

3^rd May

I felt that nothing of interest had happened to me, not understanding that every life is ordinary to its owner, that looking for interesting events was to search in the wrong direction for something that isn't absent because it isn't the point.

Jenny Diski, In Gratitude (2016)

10^th May

We have been trained to regard certain kinds of art (especially the violent, the arcane, and the assaultive) as 'experimental'. But there's all the difference in the world between studying oxidation and producing loud noises with gunpowder. The former leads somewhere; the latter... does not.

Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983)