Here are the quotes Fia chose for Women's History Month 2024:
"Works of art are like barometers: we return to them throughout our lives to check the weather conditions in our souls...
It's easy to get overwhelmed by the enormity of the shifts we need to make in both perspective & behavior. We sat around a table in my studio trying to remind ourselves of all the times throughout history in which human beings have changed their minds about something significant. We made a map of those shifts in human perspective, which became the Memory Palace... It was a chapel of consolation. It located each of these moments of significant historical perspective shift onto the surface of the planet to create a new world map based on the human ability to change our minds & our world..."
”I never change. I simply become more myself.”
“It is good to realize that falling apart is not such a bad thing. Indeed, it is as essential to evolutionary and psychological transformation as the cracking of outgrown shells..."
"If your actions create a legacy that inspires others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, then, you are an excellent leader."
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
"I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.”
~ letter from Zora Neale Hurston to Countee Cullen
"I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theatre becomes cinema."
"The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet."
“I can promise you that women working together – linked, informed and educated – can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.”
"The contemplation of things as they are, without error of confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.”
"Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day... The battle against dust and dirt is never won.”
“Reputation is what others think about you. What’s far more important is character, because that is what you think about yourself.”
"I dwell in possibility."
"Not causing harm requires staying awake. Part of being awake is slowing down enough to notice what we say and do. The more we witness our emotional chain reactions and understand how they work, the easier it is to refrain. It becomes a way of life to stay awake, slow down, and notice... Let your curiosity be greater than your fear."
"It was when I stopped searching for home within others and lifted the foundations of home within myself I found there were no roots more intimate than those between a mind and body that have decided to be whole."
"She had nothing to do but to forgive herself and be happier than ever.”
~ Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
"Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"
"Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. They are places that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience...
In these places you might experience the material and spiritual worlds coming together. Blood, worry and loss might sit together under the same tree as silence, stillness and hope... Places where a veil is lifted away and light streams in, where you see a boundary between worlds disappear right before your eyes, places where you are allowed to cross any borders, where borders and boundaries hold no sway. Lines and circles, silence and stillness – all is as it should be for that flickering gap in time.”
~ Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places
"How can one even imagine us getting back to a place where we know the names of the trees we walk by every single day? A place where “a bird” navigating a dewy meadow is transformed into something more specific, something we can hold onto by feeling its name on our tongues: brown thrasher. Or that “big tree”: catalpa. Maybe what we can do when we feel overwhelmed is to start small. Start with what we have loved as kids and see where that leads us... I think it's the quiet way you settle into the crook of a tree trunk, the still and slowdown of your heart in a world that wants us to be quick and to move onto the next thing..."
~ Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
“One question that I often get asked is how to overcome writer's block. And the funny thing is, I overcome it, by not overcoming it. I think it’s OK to not write. I think it’s OK not to talk, not to make, not to create, not to produce, produce, produce. How can we listen to the world if we are always talking to the world?
...sometimes it’s better for me to take my time, to not focus on finishing, and instead focus on gathering, on sitting in silence, on receiving. That might not be what you need, but sometimes it’s what I need. I don’t always need to be putting my pen to paper, or my fingers to keyboard, sometimes I need to read, go for a long walk, share wine with friends, nap, and listen to the music around me.
It’s not that I don’t want to accomplish things or make poems or put work out in the world. I am saying that sometimes, the best work comes when I’m focusing less on the end result and more on the pleasure of making. When you’re making something that matters to you, the world seems to open up a bit, the anxiety in the chest seems to lessen. The more quiet I can become, the more receptive I can become, the more poems will come to me.
What I love about not writing is that suddenly, I begin to hear language returning to me, new words, old words, names of loved ones, and it feels like a gift. Images too, unbidden and swirling, start to let themselves be known."
“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined...
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge – even wisdom. Like art."
