#shifting

Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he's exotic, almost appealing. Whereas once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it's been tamed and cultivated; the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives "the wild" a different kind of power; it's something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods--they come from a place we'd almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, limitless. Likewise, tales of Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within us...and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us--cat and mouse and coyote and owl--and the Others who live only in the dreams and nightmares of our imaginations. For thousands of years, their tales have emerged from the place where we draw the boundary lines between animals and human beings, the natural world and civilization, women and men, magic and illusion, fiction and the lives we live. ↗

— Terri Windling

#fairy-tales #fantasy #myth #shape-shifting #change

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#believe #change #continuing #economic #economic forces

You should always know when you're shifting gears in life. You should leave your era; it should never leave you. ↗

— Leontyne Price

#era #gears #know #leave #life

Transformation can come in the mysterious guise of shape-shifting, or through a simple change of mind ↗

— C.R. Strahan

#shape-shifting #transformation #change

I think there'd be huge losses if there weren't newspapers. I know everything's shifting to the Internet and some people would say, 'News is news, what you're talking about is a change of consumption, not the product that's out there.' But I think there is a change. ↗

— Michael Connelly

#change #consumption #everything #huge #i

Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting. ↗

— Gunter Grass

#everybody #fallible #fragments #how #join

Economic distress, political pressure, and social obloquy already drive us from our homes and from our graves. The Jews are already constantly shifting from place to place. ↗

— Theodor Herzl

#constantly #distress #drive #economic #graves

A man's brain has a more difficult time shifting from thinking to feeling than a women's brain does. ↗

— Barbara de Angelis

#difficult #difficult time #does #feeling #man

Men are only clever at shifting blame from their own shoulders to those of others. ↗

— Titus Livius

#clever #men #only #others #own

Shifting toward management meant greater responsibility and influence, but it also meant giving up programming day-to-day in my role, which was hard because it took me out of my comfort zone. ↗

— Marissa Mayer

#because #comfort #comfort zone #day-to-day #giving