It is indeed a remarkable testament to the indomitable male ego that a biblical theme holding forth an exemplum of female chastity should have become in painting a celebration of sexual opportunity, or, as Max Rooses enthusiastically described Ruben's version, a "gllant enterprise mounted by two bold adventures."

Mary Garrard

What is important is that women face up to the reality of hteir historya nd of their present situation. Disadvantage may indeed be an excuse; it is not, however, an intllectual [osition. Rather, using their situation as undersdogs and otusiders as avantage oint, women can reveal institutuional and intelllectual wekanesses in general, and , at the same time that they destroy false consciousnesness, take part in the creation of institutions in which clear thought and true greatness are challenges opne to anyone - man or women - courageous enough to take the ncessary risk, the leap into the unknown.

Linda Nochlin, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"

strange place

This wasn't a strange place; it was a new one.

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist, Book 1

I'm an adventurer

"After all, what he had always wanted was just that: to know new places. Even if he never got to the Pyramids, he had already traveled farther than any shepard he knew. Oh, if they only knew how different things are just two hours by ship from where they are, he thought... As he mused about these things, he realized that he had to choose between thinking of himself as the poor victim of a thief and as an adventurer in a quest for his treasure.

'I'm an adventurer, looking for treasure,' he said to himself."

-Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist, Book 1

we lose heart

The road is difficult not because of the deep river and high mountains that bar the way, but because we lose heart when we think of the river and the mountains.
- Vietnamese proverb, passed on by teacher Lesley Clear to her "Teaching English Internationally" Education students at UC Irvine

how essential is femininity

"The most signal omission of feminist art history to date is our failure to analyse why modern art history ignores the existence of women artists. Why it has become silent about them, why it has consistently dismissed as insignificant those it did acknowledge. To confront these questions enables us to identify the unacknowledged ideology with informs the practice of this discipline and the values which decided its classification and interpretations of all art."

Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker, "Critical Stereotypes: The essential femininity or how essential is femininity" Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology, 1981

When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still

"Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting."

Willa Cather, "Book 2, The Hired Girls: Chapter VIII" My Antonia