June 14, 2022
Gleanings
- To bring a child into this world has always been an act of hope. The past was its own parade of horrors. The best estimates we have suggest that across most of human history, 27 percent of infants didn’t survive their first year and 47 percent of people died before puberty. And life was hard, even if you were lucky enough to live it.
- When I write about Woolf myself, I feel the same anxieties Queyras expresses in their book, about taking Woolf as a subject and about adding to what’s already been written about her. It’s hard not to feel both inadequate and superfluous.
- Some times there are moments when everything hard falls away. You forget you’re tired because the sunlight falls just so across the table you’re sitting at
- the summer pushes me right out of my wrappings and out into the light. I hate it. I love it. (mostly I love it when its over, and I look back on what i have survived.)
- We may think we make ‘airy-fairy’ wishes, then forget all about them. But they remain deep inside us, percolating, finding ways to emerge and become real.
- As someone who has side-gigged at bookstores and libraries most of my adult life, I’ve always been fascinated by how we find books and authors, how sometimes the right book will find us at the right time.
- “I love for people to know more about books and reading, especially Black people,” Nurse says. “I want them to experience the power of their own imaginations. We are not entirely reliant on this crazy white world; we can go places in our heads and make things happen.”
