Highlights:
“No longer who we were, we know not who we may become. We experience ourselves as living mush, fearful of the journey down the birth canal. The whole has to do with the process of psychological pregnancy—the virgin forever a virgin, forever pregnant, forever open to possibilities.”
**pg. 7
“I want to write, but I don’t want to write essays. I want to write my way.”
**pg. 8
I have had this exact thought.
“The chrysalis only looked dead. Remarkable changes were happening inside. A caterpillar’s life was very different from a butterfly’s, and they needed very different bodies… Most of the caterpillar’s organs would dissolve, and those fluids would help the tiny wings, eyes, muscles and brain of the developing butterfly to grow. But that was very hard work, so hard that the creature could accomplish nothing else so long as it was going on.”
**pg. 13
“Many delightful babies appear in dreams, and just as many little tyrants who need firm and loving discipline. One child, however, is noticeably different from the others. This is the abandoned one, who may appear in bullrushes, in straw in a barn, in a tree, almost always in some forgotten or out-of-the-way place. This child will be radiant with light, robust, intelligent, sensitive. Often it is able to talk minutes after it is born. It has Presence. It is the Divine Child, bringing with it the ‘hard and bitter agony’ of the new dispensation—the agony of Eliot’s Magi. With its birth, the old gods have to go.”
**pg. 23