teatunesandtales

“Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.”
― Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

“The opinion of others. I was silent for a while, thinking about that. Then I said, “Have you ever read W.E.B. Dubois?” “No. I’ve heard the name in my native time, however. He was a twentieth-century activist, I believe.” “Yes. And biracial. He had an incredibly long life, from the 1860s to the 1960s, and his work was based on a blend of social analyses—but that’s not my point. The thing is, he wrote about something he called ‘double consciousness,’ which he believed was a kind of internal conflict experienced by oppressed people. He described it as the sense of looking at yourself through the eyes of people who believe you to be somehow subordinate or inferior. Your view of yourself is inevitably at war with the oppressor’s view. Anyway, he called it a two-ness, and that’s the word that resonated with me. A two-ness. Although perhaps I experience it differently from what he intended”
― Deborah Truscott, Across Time

“We were all at the mercy of chance.”
― Deborah Truscott, Across Time

“Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." -”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft