In the Corner Store, near the village center, hangs a large sign reading: 'After 40 years of credit business, we have closed our b...ook of Sorrow.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books,... unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I suspect a demand for real change in power relations will occur only if women ... come to understand that their need for romances... is a function of their dependent status as women and of their acceptance of marriage as the only route to female fulfillment. I think we as feminists might help this change along by first learning to recognize that romance reading originates in very real dissatisfaction and embodies a valid, if limited, protest. Then by developing strategies for making that dissatisfaction and its causes consciously available to romance readers and by learning how to encourage that protest in such a way that it will be delivered in the arena of actual social relations rather than acted out in the imagination, we might join hands with women who are, after all, our sisters and together imagine a world whose subsequent creation would lead to the need for a new fantasy altogether.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Romance reading and writing might be seen ... as a collectively elaborated female ritual through which women explore the consequen...ces of their common social condition as the appendages of men and attempt to imagine a more perfect state where all the needs they so intensely feel and accept as given would be adequately addressed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One can imagine a computer simulation of the action of peptides in the hypothalamus that is accurate down to the last synapse. But... equally one can imagine a computer simulation of the oxidation of hydrocarbons in a car engine or the action of digestive processes in a stomach when it is digesting pizza. And the simulation is no more the real thing in the case of the brain than it is in the case of the car or the stomach. Barring miracles, you could not run your car by doing a computer simulation of the oxidation of gasoline, and you could not digest pizza by running the program that simulates such digestion. It seems obvious that a simulation of cognition will similarly not produce the effects of the neurobiology of cognition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases, As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.... They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more. There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life, Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them. They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain ou...r miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »