Otters Hold Hands and Ants Bury Their Dead
I think it’s a deep consolation to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. That there isn’t their life and our life. Nor your life and my life. That it’s just one teetering and endless thread and all of us, all of us, are entangled with it as deep as entanglement goes.
— From Kate Forster
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Where their words, stories, and paintings failed them, their dancing took over. It was almost as if they knew how the great unknown and imponderables of their own lives had to be acted out, to be fully lived to the end in a way for which the dancing was sponsor, before it could be known and another great fragment of universal mystery transformed into living wonder. So they danced as only the stars and Shiva danced at the heart of the stillness of the dark to shake it into light.
— by Laurens van der Post
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The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world.
— James Baldwin
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