#era

Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when, while Adele played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line - that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen - that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#business

Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night--hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ago in the dark northern woods for instance) with universal radiance. Faithless sons, wars and typhoons, fields of blood, greed and knives: our literature's full of such stories. And yet suppose for an instant that it wasn't the complacent father but his bored daughter who was the Prime Mover; suppose that what came first wasn't an appetite for drama but the urge to awaken it. Mightn't we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe? ↗

— Kathryn Davis

#patriarchy #experience

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet. ↗

— Cathy Caruth

#freud #literature #psychoanalysis #trauma #experience

I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel. ↗

— Roman Payne

#growth #hard-times #hardship #jail #jailbird

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique. ↗

— Benjamin Jowett

#always #attain #cannot #concrete #general

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge. ↗

— Cleveland Amory

#expensive #foreign #hard #husband #like

No Blame: The most liberating and empowering day of my life was the day I freed myself from my own self-destructive nonsense. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#empowering #liberating #nonsense #self-destructive #success

We must remember balance and moderation. Patience can be spiritually enriching and virtuous… but when taken in excess, it turns to procrastination, the poison of inaction. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#excess #inaction #moderation #patience #poison

What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place. ↗

— Elif Batuman

#neuro-lit-crit #theory #experience

It is now recognised that dissociation is a way of forgetting, for a time. The mind siphons off the bad memories into a separate part, and reclaiming those hidden-away memories us a complex process. So, when the memories resurface it does not feel as though they belong to you, it feels alien, more as if someone had told them to you, or you had seen the images in a film. ↗

— Carolyn Bramhall

#derealisation #dissociation #dissociative-identity-disorder #memories #mpd