life between the pages

“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

four tenets from a wise woman

Meditations for today:

Economy, prudence, and a simple life are the sure masters of need, and will often accomplish that which their opposites, with a fortune at hand, will fail to do.

The surest test of discipline is its absence.

I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay.

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done... I defy the tyranny of precedent. I cannot afford the luxury of a closed mind. I go for anything new that might improve the past. --Clara Barton

When I need reminding that we have come some distance from overwhelming public stupidity, I look at the war women waged in the nineteenth century to regain some of what they had lost in the late eighteenth: respect, purpose, and the ability to have some input, for good or aught, into the direction of society. In doing so they eventually went beyond what they had achieved before, and gained sufferage, some semblance of their own economic worth, and at least some recognition of their ability to contribute to the betterment of the world. So we do not give up, we do press on, and march in time to the need of our day.

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