Random Assortment: Many Stories

 ~ "The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete." --Chimamanda Adichie, "The Danger of a Single Story" (above, although you have to click through google reader to the blog to see the video for some strange reason). Her short speech is about the power of stories and the danger of only hearing one story. She concludes, "When we reject the single story, we regain a kind of paradise" (via Dillard).

~ Dostoevsky and Dickins: They are supposed to have met, and Dostoevsky is supposed to have written this about their meeting (I suppose this is silly to mention, since it probably is a farce, but it's a nice, made-up excerpt/letter nonetheless):

"He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters; from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked."

"Only two people?" is a great line, especially given Bakhtin's observation of the real polyphony or many voices of Dostoevsky's novels (via Slate and everyone else).

~ There's so much wisdom in this letter from John Steinbeck to his son about falling in love. And so I will have to quote at length:

"There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.
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Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.
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And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away."