“I met a wonderful new man! He’s fictional, but you can’t have everything.”
— Cecilia, The Purple Rose of Cairo (via lucette)
(Source: quote-book, via booklover)
“There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.”
— Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic (via misswallflower)
(via booklover)
“A great poem makes us experience a moment, and a great short story makes us experience an epiphany, and a great novel makes us experience an entire other life.”
— Katherine Mansfield (via confusionis)
(via booklover)
“Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.”
—
Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)
Professor Cecilia Payne, ladies and gentlemen.
(via neon-loneliness)
This is a great example of how the education we receive focuses around the discoveries and perspectives of men.
(via fffigures)
—————-
Woah. PUTTING ON A HAT AND THEN TIPPING IT TO YOU, COSMIC QUEEN CECILIA PAYNE!
(via emmyc)
(via callimeric)
“As the term political correctness suggests, identity politics developed an increasingly intricate sense of decorum: there was a right way to go about things and a million ways for the novice and the dilettante to screw up. The controversies over terminology were the most striking
example of this preciousness. Quick, which is correct: Negro, Black, black, Afro-American, African American, colored person, person of color? Gay, queer, gay men and lesbians, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered? Ladies, women, womyn? Is the gendered pronoun okay? S/he (or does that suggest the female gender is just adjunctive to the male)? He/she? It?
Maybe it’s better that you just sit in the back of the room and listen. The acknowledged message behind all of this correctness was loud and clear: social justice was the domain of the professional—don’t try this at home, kids.”
example of this preciousness. Quick, which is correct: Negro, Black, black, Afro-American, African American, colored person, person of color? Gay, queer, gay men and lesbians, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered? Ladies, women, womyn? Is the gendered pronoun okay? S/he (or does that suggest the female gender is just adjunctive to the male)? He/she? It?
Maybe it’s better that you just sit in the back of the room and listen. The acknowledged message behind all of this correctness was loud and clear: social justice was the domain of the professional—don’t try this at home, kids.”
—
Fred Thompson Ford, What’s Queer About Race?
Published in After Sex?: On Writing Since Queer Theory (Janet Halley, Andrew Parker, Michèle Aina Barale)
I’m having such an issue with political correctness now. At first it was, like, oh look: a means of curing all the hateful, hurtful, and discriminatory language we’ve amassed over the years. Cool beans. But it’s gone far beyond that. Now it’s just more frou-frou frivolity that takes away from real issues that need to be addressed through “a smart reconcentration of the English language.” Understood, people will always have their own preferences (he, she, it, black, negro, handicapped, differently abled, special) but it’s gotten to the point where everyone would rather just shut up than shame themselves by making a mistake. What an attitude. We’ve spent so much of our collective history fighting for freedom of expression only to end up censoring ourselves. Because, what, it discredits us as intellectuals to assume and use the wrong gendered pronoun? Are we assuming here that transgendered people are incapable of correcting people politely? Or is this just one of those pride things where, as one of my professors would say, we prefer to be assumed dumb than to open our mouths and remove all doubt? Political correctness (to the degree I take issue with, I mean) doesn’t have to be a problem if we just keep in mind that we are, in the end, all just people. We’re as prone to mistakes as the next guy.
(Or should I say guy/girl? Not that I’m implying that guys should be listed before girls, it could totally be the other way around, neither one is the dominant gender, I’m just doing it for the sake of brevity, honest, I’m not trying to be sexist or anything…)
(Source: cosmopolitan-fascist)
“I wish I could still go out into all nooks and corners of the country and bring better care for children.”
— Dr. Fe del Mundo, first Filipina awarded as National Scientist. She passed away today at the age of 99. She founded the first pediatric hospital in the country, and is credited with devising an incubator for use in rural areas without electricity. (via pinoytumblr)
“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.”
— John Gardner (via readingandriting)
(Source: koti.mbnet.fi, via booklover)
