Quotable: The Virgin Suicides

“We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.” ― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

Quotable: This Accident of Being Lost

This Accident of Being Lost by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is, without hesitation, one of the best books I've read this year. It, alongside Brother by David Chariandy, which I'm reading now, make me think the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize really got things right this year. 

Here are two quotes from This Accident of Being Lost that are among the many I dog-earred. Read my short review of This Accident of Being Lost at THIS Magazine. 

Quotable: Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

"I was thirty-two—which really seemed like the tail end of my twenties, still. I felt as young as spring. When my mother was that age, she had already had me, after trying for five years. But it was different now. None of my good friends had babies. Not Emma, my second self, who had moved to Los Angeles to become an actress and live surrounded by otherworldly foliage in a little apartment on Whitley Avenue. Not Matt and Jesse, my friends since childhood; they had day jobs at websites and played in a band at bars on the Lower East Side at night. All of us still drank too much. All of us assumed we still had time for reinvention." 

— Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

Quotable: Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter

"I spent the day at the archives and photocopied enough material to cover the entire floor white. But the original diaries I never got to handle. Someone had taken them out before me. Somewhere, across these several well-lit acres of industrial study of the past, a set of eyes was reading about the Newfoundland regiment. It was the only fact I could not research. Who. Reading was the only activity in the room not ordered or catalogued." — Michael Winter, Into the Blizzard

Quotable: Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein

"After talking to so many girls, I now know what to hope for — for my own daughter and for them. I want sexuality to be a source of self-knowledge and creativity and communication despite its potential risks. I want them to revel in their bodies' sensuality without being reduced to it. I want them to be able to ask for what they want in bed, and to get it. I want them to be safe from disease, unwanted pregnancy, cruelty, dehumanization, and violence. If they are assaulted, I want them to have recourse from their school administrators, employers, the courts. It's a lot to ask for, but it's not too much. We've raised a generation of girls to have a voice, to expect egalitarian treatment in the home, in the classroom, in the workplace. Now it's time to demand that "intimate justice" in their personal lives as well."

— Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein

Quotable: Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein

The perk of celebrating Easter early in the weekend is that while everyone else is hustling and gathering, I have a Sunday to read and relax. I've been devouring Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein, who is one third of the band Sleater-Kinney and co-creator of Portlandia, and it's endlessly enjoyable, but I especially took pause when Brownstein wrote about the band's experiences opening for Pearl Jam, a move that challenged Brownstein's perceptions in unexpected ways.

Quotable: Unfinished Business by Anne-Marie Slaughter

" ... If we want to move forward — for women and men, for our workplaces, and for our society as a whole — we must first step back and take a hard look at what we reflexively believe to be true. We must question the conventional wisdom, aphorisms, memes, and stories that inform or justify our choices and shape our worlds. We have to ask ourselves why we are so certain of our often-buried assumptions about the way things are, both for ourselves and for millions of others whose lives we can only try to imagine.

"We can only change and bring about change if we can genuinely open our minds to new thoughts and possibilities, for everyone."

— Unfinished Business by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a passage that feels especially important after finishing two days of anti-racism and anti-oppression training at work

Quotable: Let the Elephants Run by David Usher

"Artist or entrepreneur, in my mind we are all hustlers and thieves. We are an amalgamation of the ideas that surround us. There may be a few rare geniuses that can pull incredible brilliance out of the air without any prior knowledge or contextual influence. But for the rest of us, ideas are based on other ideas. We build off the work of others. Consciously or subconsciously, our creations are an evolution of the ones that came before.

"We absorb and steal, rob and plunder — whatever it takes to get our creativity moving. We take the best ideas we can find, not to plagiarize them outright but to mash them together, twisting them into knots with the hope of exposing new shapes and new forms."

Solo Adventure: Chester and Manchester

Nearly a year ago, I travelled to the UK, starting in London, taking a train to Edinburgh, and ending in Chester for a friend's wedding. I've posted already about parts of this trip, but sadly, it's taken me a year to wrap up this series. Check out the other posts here:

Solo Adventure: London

Solo Adventure: Edinburgh

Solo Adventure: Scottish Highlands

London, Edinburgh, and the Scottish Highlands were busy excursions. I darted from landmark to landmark, town to town, in an effort to see as much as I could in my mere week abroad. Thankfully, my friend's wedding was in the outskirts of Chester, in a part of the country ruled by green pastures and lambs, and I was forced to take some time to relax and enjoy the scenery. 

I trudged around Chester, a city of Roman baths and beautiful architecture that lies on the River Dee, near the border of Wales, with my backpack, which was already weighted down by souvenirs. Then I took the greatest bus ride of my life, through tiny towns and over stone bridges, to reach Higher Farm Bed and Breakfast, a beautiful slice of perfection that I hope to one day revisit. I walked. I snapped pictures. I watched lambs chase one another and I relaxed. 

I wasn't planning on going to Manchester. After a week of moving quickly from city to city, the backpack's straps cutting into my shoulders, I was ready to stay in one place. But my flight was out of the Manchester Airport, and in order to get to my airport hotel, I needed to pass through the Manchester Piccadilly train station. I'm one of those people who live in fear of missed opportunities. Knowing it might be my only chance to see Manchester, I couldn't pass it up. I'm glad I didn't.

One quick book blogger anecdote before I wrap up these posts for good. I'm a fairly awkward human being — one who isn't the best at striking up conversations or meeting new people. But of all people in the world standing in the baggage line in the Manchester Airport, I spotted Steph from Bella's Bookshelf. After I checked her Twitter account, and confirmed she, too, was in England, I went to say hello. After meeting Tanya from 52 Books or Bust in Edinburgh a few days before, my first solo European adventure turned out to be way more of a #CanLit adventure than I ever could have imagined.

I'll end these posts with a quote by Terry Pratchett, an author the world lost only last week. It reminds me of the importance of travel, and more so, the importance of travelling alone, giving yourself the chance to escape your comfort zone and see the world in a new way.

"Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."

— Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky (Discworld, #32)

Quotable: An Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King

“Truth be known, I prefer fiction. I dislike the way facts try to thrust themselves upon me. I’d rather make up my own world. Fictions are less unruly than histories. The beginnings are more engaging, the characters more co-operative, the endings more in line with expectations of morality and justice. This is not to imply that fiction is exciting and that history is boring. Historical narratives can be as enchanting as a Stephen Leacock satire or as terrifying as a Stephen King thriller.

Still, for me at least, writing a novel is buttering warm toast, while writing a history is herding porcupines with your elbows.”

— Thomas King in An Inconvenient Indian, shortlisted for Canada Reads 2015

Quotable: David Foster Wallace

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”

— David Foster Wallace, Up, Simba!

Quotable: Neil Gaiman

 
 “I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”

— Neil Gaiman

Fall

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.”

― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Quotable: Tuck Everlasting

"The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone."

— Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

Quotable: Eve Ensler

"Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don't want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you're doing here. Believe in kissing."

— Eve Ensler

Quotable: L.M Montgomery

If there was ever a quote written especially for me, this would be it:

“I am simply a ‘book drunkard.’ Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.” — L.M. Montgomery

Quotable: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.” 

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath's death. Of all the many tributes I read to her yesterday, this was my favourite. The colourful photograph with Plath smiling that accompanies the post has haunted me all day.