Book detail: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book is a contemplative exploration of the intersections between words, women, and places, offering a nuanced examination of these themes through a variety of perspectives.
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“Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“The menopause is probably the least glamorous topic imaginable; and this is interesting, because it is one of the very few topics to which cling some shreds and remnants of taboo. A serious mention of menopause is usually met with uneasy silence; a sneering reference to it is usually met with relieved sniggers. Both the silence and the sniggering are pretty sure indications of taboo.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“Certainly the effort to remain unchanged, young, when the body gives so impressive a signal of change as the menopause, is gallant; but it is a stupid, self-sacrificial gallantry, better befitting a boy of twenty than a woman of forty-five or fifty. Let the athletes die young and laurel-crowned. Let the soldiers earn the Purple Hearts. Let women die old, white-crowned, with human hearts.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“Any artist must expect to work amid the total, rational indifference of everybody else to their work, for years, perhaps for life.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“Crankish attacks on the freedom to read are common at present. When backed and coordinated by organized groups, they become sinister.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other--outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women & wilderness, to be used as I see fit.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer's job is to be its medium.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong -- not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck -- if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“You learn to say goodbye to places, to keep them in your heart and go on. Over the hills and a great way off.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse’s skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
That’s what I want—to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you—I want to hear you. I want to listen to you talking to each other and to us all: whether you’re writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgment or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations, I want to hear you. Speak with a woman’s tongue.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places