December (continued)

Scan177On journal writing

“As the number of studies increased, it became clear that writing was a far more powerful tool for healing than anyone had ever imagined” James W. Pennebaker

“I don’t want to live in a hand-me-down world of others’ experiences. I want to write about me, my discoveries, my fears, my feelings, about me” Helen Keller

“There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write” William M. Thackeray

“Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter. And lead pencil markings endure longer than memory” Jack London

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open” Natalie Goldberg

“I haven’t written for a few days, because I wanted first of all to think about my diary. It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I—nor for that matter anyone else—will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Still, what does that matter? I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart” Anne Frank

Δεκέμβρης (updated)

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Scan176‘Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of human spirit to be free’ Anne Sullivan

‘There is really nothing more to say – except why. But since why is difficult to handle one must take refuge in how’ (1969, The Bluest Eyes, Toni Morrison)

‘If you’re going to hold someone down you’re going to have to hold on to the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression’ Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison on censorship “The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, cancelled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink” (2009).

‘I’m interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great deal more about contemporary life’ Toni Morrison