“Naming is an exercise of power. Renaming involves a transfer of power. Unnaming is a stripping of power from the unnamed and often an abuse of power on the part of those who presume to reduce names to numbers, for instance. It takes courage to name what is being deliberately and defensively obscured. Plain language is not always welcome.” WritingPeace Author:Marilyn McEntyre
“As with every abstraction, we need to tie the word to actualities to keep it from floating into the euphemistic ether where it can do as much harm as carbon.” WritingPeace Author:Marilyn McEntyre
“Outrage... can (and often does) look like arrogance or offensiveness or, certainly, impropriety. But it can be what fuels love of justice and mercy.” WritingPeace Author:Marilyn McEntyre
“But the more I see of the damage simplistic thinking can do, the more I admire and cling to John Keats's notion of "negative capability" which he defined as the capacity to dwell in ambiguity or paradox without any "irritable reaching after fact and reason." To allow room for wonder, speculation, uncertainty.” WritingPeace Author:Marilyn McEntyre
“The final lines of one of Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets ... have stayed with me as a valuable standard against which to measure my motives when I write and teach hoping to keep my work relational, and to do it with a servant's heart: 'Love in the open hand, nothing but that ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt, as one would give you cowslips in a hat swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt, I bring you, calling out, as children do, 'Look what I have! - And these are all for you.” WritingPeace Author:Marilyn McEntyre