Books

But it occurred to me that maybe if I began (or, to be honest, continued) super-producing both asked-for and unasked-for recordings of my uke covers as gifts, I could possibly help jump-start a creative gift economy that would spill over into the larger world of exchange.

Barbara Browning, The Gift

"You will find this, perhaps, an over-intellectualization of the event. Indeed, but this was what I was trained to do. This, and pliés."

-Barbara Browning, I’m Trying To Reach You

“She cleared her throat once or twice, and said something about poor people should eat a lot of herrings, as they were most nutritious, also she had heard poor people eat heaps of sheeps' heads and she went on to ask if I ever cooked them. I said I would rather be dead than cook or eat a sheep's head; I'd seen them in butchers' shops with awful eyes and bits of wool sticking to their skulls. After that helpful hints for the poor were forgotten.”

Barbara Comyns, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

"I thought that if my mother hadn't died she would have taught me all about female things that didn't interest me: cooking, sewing, pleasing, self-sacrifice. She would have taught me to be a better person than the one I'd become."

-Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women

"The sky looked like nothing, because that's what it is. It's not even a color. I looked back down at my phone and pulled up searches and feeds, hit refresh. I can cut off anyone on these lists, simple, but they'll always be there, sending out energy that I'll always in some way be receiving. I may as well know exactly what it is."

–from Surveys by Natasha Stagg