Reading on Women’s Month is something I look forward to each year. There’s simply nothing like communing with some of the fiercest minds in literature for an entire month!
I’m glad to have kicked off with Hurricane Clarice and Hanne Ørstavik, but this month’s reading goals are not too unrealistic: One Sontag essay a day (although I will definitely squeeze in what I can). I cannot fully express how much her words feed me so profoundly.
“…literature was a criticism of one’s own reality, in the light of a better standard.” — From The World As India
“Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours? Who would we be if we could not forget ourselves, at least some of the time? Who would we be if we could not learn? Become something other than we are?” — From Literature is Freedom
“To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism… Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.” — From Literature is Freedom
“And one of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives, and make choices, and propose and accept standards for ourselves, is our experiences of singular authoritative voices, not our own, which make up that great body of work that educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us to be in the world, that embodies and defends the glories of language: namely, literature.” — From At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning
“The writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth… and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification… the job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.” — From The Conscience of Words
“A writer is first of all a reader.” — From The World As India
“The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.” — From An Argument About Beauty
The Book-Butterfly 