When Mary Shelley Said She Always Felt On The Inside Like A Little Poor Rain-drenched Plant, We All Felt

when mary shelley said she always felt on the inside like a little poor rain-drenched plant, we all felt that

“Being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared. Being brave means that you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway.”

— Coraline, Neil Gaiman

“Autumn is my season, dear. It is, after all, the season of the soul.”

— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Violet Dickinson written c. July 1907

“Perhaps we are the same person. Perhaps we have no limits; perhaps we flow into each other, stream through each other, boundlessly and magnificently. You bear terrible thoughts; it is almost painful to be near you. At the same time it is enticing. Do you know why?”

— Ingmar Bergman, Fanny and Alexander

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)

“I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it. And I remembered. I would not be the person I am without the authors who made me what I am—the special ones, the wise ones, sometimes just the ones who got there first. It’s not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It’s the most important thing there is.”

— Neil Gaiman, “Newberry Medal Acceptance Speech”