Taylor, Barbara Brown -- Learning to Walk in the Dark, ch. 1 (2014)

Dave — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 17:59:14 +0000

At home we read Pinocchio instead. We read Black Beauty, Doctor Dolittle, Little Women, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. What I learned about darkness from stories, I learned from books like these — and also from the unedited works of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen.
According to a recent article in the New York Times, few parents expose their children to those works in the original these days, and some of their reasons make sense. Who wants children growing up with the idea that stepmothers are wicked, ugly people are evil, women can get by on their beauty, and princesses are all white? At the same time, I worry about children who grow up thinking that every story has a happy ending and no one gets permanently hurt along the way.

Barbara Brown Taylor (b. 1951) American minister, academic, author
Learning to Walk in the Dark, ch. 1 (2014)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, Introduction (2010)

Dave — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 18:41:56 +0000

We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, Introduction (2010)

WIST Quotations

Taylor, Barbara Brown -- Learning to Walk in the Dark, ch. 1 (2014)

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas -- The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, Introduction (2010)