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Finding out what particular insights mean to people in other traditions enables us not only to respect but to love the wisdom of other religions.

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Tillie Olsen

Not everybody feels religion the same way. Some it's in their mouth, but some it's like a hope in their blood, their bones.

Blood, Everybody, Feels, Hope, Religion, Women
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Literary history and the present are dark with silences. . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

Agonie, Lying, Speak, Struggle, Unnatural, Writing

That's what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks.

Grow, Growing Up, Hands, Holding, Peace

It's hard for me to talk about the terrible things that have happened in my lifetime because they didn't need to be.

Happened, Lifetime, Needs, Talk, Terrible, Things

The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years - responses to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters - stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks take me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.

Possible, Responses, Responsibility, Takes, Writing, Years

Think about all that we've lost that has been said orally because nobody was taking it down. I feel very fortunate to live in a time where we have so many different voices. We have a much richer literature than we've ever had, and we can know America so much better.

America, Orally, Richer, Thinking, Voice
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