Rat/culture/fiction

Famous quotes containing the words rat, culture and/or fiction:

    A rat crept softly through the vegetation
    Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
    While I was fishing in the dull canal
    On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
    Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
    And on the king my father’s death before him.
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

    Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian—even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been “ghosted”Mor made to seem invisible—by culture itself.... Once the lesbian has been defined as ghostly—the better to drain her of any sensual or moral authority—she can then be exorcised.
    Terry Castle, U.S. lesbian author. The Apparitional Lesbian, ch. 1 (1993)

    We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)