#though

You can possess a book without really owning it, though. Beyond ownership in a commercial or legal sense, there’s ownership of an emotional or metaphysical kind - when a book speaks so powerfully to us that we feel it’s ours exclusively: that it exists just tor us. People we meet sometimes have this effect too; they look into our eyes, and speak in a hushed, intimate voice, and make us feel we’re uniquely important to them - before going on to do the same to someone else. In life, we call these people flirts. The best books are flirtatious, too, since they seem to be ours alone when in reality they’re anyone’s. ↗

— Blake Morrison

#twelve-thoughts-about-reading #life

It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thought we knew all along. Right now, though, for those who teach the plays and write about his life, it hasn't been easy abandoning old habits of mind. I know that I am not alone in struggling to come to terms with how profoundly it alters one's sense of how Shakespeare wrote, especially toward the end of his career when he coauthored half of his last ten plays. For intermixed with five that he wrote alone, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, are Timon of Athens (written with Thomas Middleton), Pericles (written with George Wilkins), and Henry the Eighth, the lost Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen (all written with John Fletcher). ↗

— James Shapiro

#collaboration #history-of-thought #shakespeare #teaching #life

I never thought Cathy would get married in the comic strip. And I also thought I would never get married. ↗

— Cathy Guisewite

#cathy #comic #comic strip #get #get married

The generation that followed did not have the same concerns; none of its members attempted to follow the example of the past generation. There was no longer anyone with the noble determination to get to know the great men of the world, or if there were some individuals consumed with this curiosity, they were few in number. From then on, there remained only vulgar minds given over to hatred, envy and discord, who took an interest only in things which did not concern them, gossip, slander, calumny of one's neighbors, all those things which are the source of the worst of our troubles. ↗

— Cheikh Anta Diop

#men

There once was a girl who found herself dead. She spent her days peering over the ledge of heaven, her chin in her palm. She was bored as a brick, hadn't adjusted yet to the slower pace of heavenly life. Her sister would look up at her and wave, and the dead girl would wave back but she was took far away for her sister to see. The dead girl thought her sister might be writing her notes, but it was too long a trip to make for a few scattered words here and there so she let them be. And then, one day, her earthbound sister finally realized she could hear music up there in heaven, so after that, everything her sister needed to tell her she did through her clarinet and each time she played, the dead girl jumped up (no matter what else she was doing), and danced. ↗

— Jandy Nelson

#hope #music

There is only as much space, only as much time, Only as much desire, only as many words, Only as many pages, only as much ink To accept all of us at light-speed Hurrying into the Promised Land Of oblivion that is waiting for us sooner or later. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#desire #ink #light-speed #literature #literature-quotes

Neither alive nor dead; No one lets up, No one wins. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#circling #dead #dejan-stojanovic #letting-go #literature

Thoughtless risks are destructive, of course, but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity. ↗

— Gary Ryan Blair

#course #destructive #even #failure #inaction

The same sort of thing was supposed to happen when performance animation was invented: Everybody thought it would save so much time. But it became its own niche altogether. ↗

— Lev Yilmaz

#animation #became #everybody #happen #invented

The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious. ↗

— Cordelia Fine

#gender-equality #men #psychology #science #thought-provoking