22 - 28 December 24 QOTW
Image: red mitten on snow. Photo by Charles Earl
I am compiling these quotes on December 21, winter solstice. This morning I heard a snippet from CBC Radio 1 Ottawa’s In Town and Out. Giacomo Panico was speaking with someone about the All Our Relations Winter Solstice Celebration at Mādahòkì Farm. The representative was talking about Indigenous philosophies surrounding winter. The idea that winter is supposed to be a time of healing and rest, a chance to prepare for the renewal of spring. May your final days of 2024 give you rest, peace and a spirit of renewal to come. Thank you for reading the quotes of the week that I glean in my daily explorations and engagements with the world. Thank you to all the writers, artists and thinkers who care so deeply about the world that they create art. Art is connection. Art is resistance. Art is our way of coping and figuring out how to understand the imperfections and beauty of living.
Sunday
There isn’t a healthy body in the world stronger than a sick person’s spirit.
Illness and the Myth of Strength
, What a Yoga Class Got Wrong About Resilience in Things that Don’t Suck.Monday
Kink is often pathologized in popular culture, the attendant desires flattened, simplified, and turned into a joke, a cause for only shame. In movies, television shows, and popular books, kinky people are often also serial killers, emotionally stunted plutocrats, and other stock villains or exaggerated figures of fun. Instead of pathologizing kink, the stories in this anthology treat it as a complex, psychologically rich act of communication. Kink in these stories is a way of processing trauma, and also of processing joy, of expressing tenderness and cruelty and affection and play. The emotional dynamics of kink are as varied as those of any other human experience, and the stories here explore the whole gamut of human feeling, from exuberance to anguish. Rejecting reductive ideas of normalcy and aberrance, these stories allow for investigations richer than etiology, treating kink as one of the tools we use to make sense of our lives.
from the introduction to Kink: Stories, edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell.
Tuesday
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
James Baldwin, as quoted in Kink: Stories. Apparently from Life Magazine, 1963
Wednesday
Language is a living thing, and when it dies, it leaves bones.
Maria Dahvana Headley, introduction to Beowulf, A New Translation
Thursday
Recently, you said to me by email that the joke is you’ve spent nine years now Googling what is a plot and you still don’t know what it is.
David Naimon, speaking to Johana Hedva on Between the Covers. This is one of my favourite Between the Covers conversations. I love David’s multi-headed question interview style and the way he gets guests to open up. I love the way his guests are folks I have never heard of, and I just want to read all of their books. Hedva is on my to be read list, for sure. She resists the mainstream in ways that intrigue and delight me.
Friday
The fact is that life just hurts. No one gets out of here unscathed.
, Why does life have to hurt so much? in the Corners.Saturday
The colour of springtime is in the flower; the color of winter is in the imagination." — Ward Elliot Hour
If you have inspiring and intriguing quotes to share, please reach out. I’d love to include them here.
Thank you to those who have supported my efforts via a paid or free subscription or by buying me a coffee. And a special shout out to those who renewed their paid subscriptions. You are wonderful! If you couldn’t afford to this year, that’s understandable. I appreciate all of you, subscribers, readers and casual observers. You are welcome.