“That song [“Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” by Carole King) is the most true song that’s ever been written.” p175 “Speaking so loudly [about football] and with such arrogant authority that everyone else sort of had to listen.” p219 “Is it just me or is it crazy that football chat is taken seriously when …
Category: literature
May 26 2025
Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher – delightful!
“… I argued that the arts are a form of diversity [which was] sadly characterized as ‘divisive’” p28 “… watching me pull at what remains of my hair while I stamp back and forth in paroxysms of incredulty caused by the half-baked ideas casually lobbed in my direction from the back of the room.” p55 …
May 14 2025
from “Emergency Skin” by N. K. Jemisin
” … the Founders told us that the Earth died because of greed. That was true, but they lied about whose greed was to blame. …” “What the Leaving proved was that the Earth could sustain billions, if we simply shared resources and responsibilities in a sensible way. What it couldn’t sustain was a handful …
May 11 2025
From Picoult’s By Any Other Name
“… he’d said the main character in her play was unrelatable, because she made questionable choices. At the time, he was producing a revival of Sweeney Todd, about a barber with anger-management issues who murdered his patrons.” p163 “Grief was the tax of having something precious.” p324
Apr 14 2025
a couple good John Varley bits
“Humans are a time-binding species, existing, in the eternal now. The future flows through them and becomes the past, but it is always the present that counts.” from “Overdrawn on the Memory Bank” I’ve been thinking that I am UNlike my dog in this respect, in that SHE lives only in the present b/c she …
Mar 14 2025
some nice bits from James Tiptree, Jr.
“Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. …” … “Men and women aren’t different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do.” “Do they?” .. She mutters something that could be “My Lai” and looks away. “All the endless wars …” Her …
Feb 26 2025
some delightful David Brin
“Is there a moral or logical justification for a creator to weild capricious power of life and death over his creations?” from “Stones of Significance” * “Death postponed. Metastasized cells got organized.” “Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.” (both from Insistence of Vision)
Oct 30 2023
Among the things that don’t count …
[Bernadette Powell, a black woman from Ithaca, New York, is now serving a 15-year-to-life sentence … because in 1978 she shot and killed her ex-husband.] [T]he Tompkins county prosecutor … argued … that [she] had no reason to fear bodily harm from her ex-husband because although the man admittedly had committed many violent acts against …
May 10 2023
from Jack Holland’s A Brief History of Misogyny
(All quotes are from Jack Holland’s A Brief History of Misogyny) “It was a battle for the ultimate mechanism of control within a woman’s body—her reproductive cycle. For a woman, this right is the most crucial of all, and the key to achieving real autonomy. Misogyn denies her autonomy; her subordination depends on the lack …
Mar 15 2023
John Varley’s Dark Lightning
It’s just space opera, but I love that the girls kick ass and the prettyboy hunk is pretty much useless.
fiction
