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2024

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Jan 2024

3rd January

Sir Winston had to divest himself of his rain gear, which included galoshes, a source of fascination to Griselda, for whom they had only ever been a rumour in children’s books. Straps and buckles... Not for the first time, she wondered about the fetishism of the upper classes; about their clinging on to the ways of childhood - the nannies and the school dinner menus; the club ties - and about the wisdom of putting those mired in their own pasts in charge of all our futures.

Mick Herron, The Secret Hours (2023)

10th January

The problem of "outsider" artists is the whole problem of what to do with unlabeled, disallowed, disavowed, not-even-consciously-perceived experience which cannot be spoken about because it has no embodiment in existing art. Is one to create new forms wholesale--which is practically impossible? Or turn to old ones.... Or "trivial," trashy genres, like Austen's ladies' fiction?

Joanna Russ, 'What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write' (1972) in To Write Like A Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (1995)

17th January

[O]nly the slow perspective, the long view, lets you see the power that lies in ordinary people, in movements, in campaigns that often are seen as unrealistic, extreme, aiming for the impossible at their inception.

Rebecca Solnit, 'Slow Change Can Be Radical Change' (2024)

24th January

You know, the secret connections behind everything always come down to people you never hear about, who put things together so other stuff can happen. It’s something I’ve seen over and over again, yet historians always neglect to mention it!

Greg Shaw, cited in 'The Music Mogul' in Rob Hansen (ed.) Beyond Fandom: Fans, Culture & Politics in the 20th Century (2023)

31st January

[P]eople who see themselves as recorders and observers are always surprised to be seen as doers and movers.

Doris Lessing, African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992)

Feb 2024

7th February

[T]here are more women whom men find attractive than men whom women find attractive[.]

Rebecca West, 1900 (1982)

14th February

His book [Thomas Smith, Syntagma de druidum moribus, 1664] provides a classic illustration of how a completely erroneous theory, based ultimately on mere wish-fulfilment, can be argued with admirable learning and logic.

Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (2009)

21st February

Confound you handsome young fellows! you think of having it all your own way in the world. You don’t understand women. They don’t admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.

George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)

28th February

"I don't think you know what you want."
He replied at dictation speed with a great deal of care, in fact far too much,
"I want you."
The curious fact was that he meant it, but someone coming into the cinema at that moment could be well and truly forgiven for thinking the reverse. I nearly said: "Oh please, do that bit again, a little better."

Rosemary Tonks, The Halt during the Chase (1972)

Mar 2024

6th March

We writers all stand on each other's shoulders, we all use each other's ideas and skills and plots and secrets. Literature is a communal enterprise.... Understand me: I don't mean plagiarism: I'm not talking about imitation, or copyring, or theft.... What I mean is that stuff from other people's books gets into us just as our own experiences does, and, like our own experience, gets composted and transmuted and transformed by the imagination, and comes forth entirely changed, our own, growing out of our own mind's earth.

Ursula K Le Guin, 'The Question I Get Asked Most Often' (2000), in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination (2004)

13th March

A man was pressing me to do something I did not want to do, and pressing me in a manner he would never have applied to another man: by telling me that I didn't know what I wanted. I felt my eyes narrowing and my heart going cold. For the first--but not the last--time, I consciously felt men to be a species separate from myself. Separate and foreign. It was as though an invisible membrane had fallen between me and my lover, one fine enough to be penetrated by desire but opaque enough to obscure human fellowship.

Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (2015)

20th March

[A] first rate potboiler is likely to be better written, to be far more worth the money and attention of the reader, than a tenth rate work of art.

Margaret Kennedy, Outlaws on Parnassus (1958)

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