"Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it."
— Roland Barthes

"C'est sous la pression de l'Histoire et de la tradition, que s'établissent les écritures possibles d'un écrivain donné: il y a une Histoire de l'écriture; mais cette Histoire est double: au moment même où l'Histoire générale propose -- ou impose -- une nouvelle problématique du langage littéraire, l'écriture reste encore pleine du souvenir de ses usages antérieurs, car le langage n'est jamais innocent: les mots ont une mémoire seconde qui se prolonge mystérieusement au milieu des significations nouvelles. L'écriture est précisément ce compromis entre une liberté et une souvenir, elle est cette liberté souvenante qui n'est liberté que dans le geste du choix, mais déja plus dans sa durée."
— Roland Barthes

"It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind."
— Samuel R. Delany (Equinox)

""They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.”
"I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.” "
— Nawal El Saadawi (Woman At Point Zero)

"We need people in our lives with whom we can be as open as possible. To have real conversations with people may seem like such a simple, obvious suggestion, but it involves courage and risk."
— Thomas Moore

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing)

"All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles,and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together."
— Octavia E. Butler

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."
— Plutarch

"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together."
— Hannah Arendt