Good Eats

I've been reading this book for years, not because I'm a slow reader, but because I don't want to finish. Its insight is spot on and empowering:

It is play, not properness, that is the central artery, the core,
the brain stem of creative life. The impulse to play is an instinct. No play, no creative life. Be good, no creative life. Sit still, no creative life. Speak, think, act only demurely, little creative juice. Any group, society, institution, or organization that encourages women to revile the eccentric; to be suspicious of the new and unusual; to avoid the fervent, the vital, the innovative; to impersonalize the personal, is asking for a culture of dead women (251)

this quote is woven deeply into the blood that keeps me honest.