This is the second attempt at this blog post.  I became way too verbose in my previous crack that it became a convoluted, ineffectual stream-of-consciousness piece of drivel.  Less is more in this case so I will get straight to the point rather than bore my reader, and myself, with garrulous exposition.  Jumping right in, I'll begin with the crux of this blog--literary quotes.  Explication to follow.

From Jeanette Winterson's Art and Lies:

It's a truism that as faith in God has declined, belief in science, especially medical science, has increased.  Yet most people know even less about science than they did about God.  Science is now incomprehensible to the layman but the layman accepts it, even though one of the arguments against God is that He doesn't make sense.


Catholics, it is true, are encouraged to express their emotions, providing that the emotions they express are Catholic ones.


She went to look at paintings....Often, when she liked a picture, she found that she was liking some part of herself, some part of her that was in accord with the picture.  She shied away from what she couldn't understand...that challenged what she thought she knew, what she thought had to be true.


There was a day when Picasso understood.  The only comparable day had been when she was a little child learning to read.  The forms of the letters had hurt her eyes, she found them ugly, crude, arrogant, nothing.  She longed to be out in the sun.  She was good at games, the form of her body was a form she knew, it had shape and meaning. 
             She stared at the page.  It meant nothing to her.
             She stared at the page.  It meant nothing to her.
             She stared at the page, and without thinking, she read it.  The harsh closed letters sang into being.  Sang into her being.  She could read.
             After that, she could not be separated from her books.

There are so many great quotes from this book, which I marked for various reasons.  But I've chosen to reflect briefly on only these few as they are more suitable to the purposes of this entry:  Understanding myself.  The first two quotes speak to my ongoing struggle with spirituality versus religion.  Having been raised a Catholic, I find that no matter what I might learn, or how I may grow spiritually, I am continually drawn back to the church and its tenets.  When a belief system has been so ingrained into one's development as a human being, it can be quite difficult to eschew regardless of a strong desire to do so.  So although I might have adopted my very own unique dogma, many of which theories are in direct opposition with Catholic teachings, I feel compelled to take up the mantle of teacher to a younger generation of Catholics, encouraging them to learn more about their faith and to continue within the religion into adulthood.  That being said, I often find myself playing the devil's advocate (sometimes quite literally) within my Catholic bible study group.  What I have concluded about this juxtaposition of beliefs and behaviors is this:   If I am in a group that might share my belief structure, I will fight like hell against them.  But I will defend said structure to anyone who may question it.  It's not anything I strive to do, it just is what I do.  What I have concluded from this is that I hate being put in a box.  I hate people assuming I will say and do one thing because it is consistent with the label they have pinned on me--or that I have unwittingly pinned on myself.

Reading the next two quotes was like reading something written about myself.  The girl looks at the paintings and discovers that what she likes about a particular piece of art is relative to what she likes about herself.  Art is such a personal thing.  It's personal for the artist who creates it, and the consumer who displays it.  As an artist, I could never part with one of my pieces.  The subject matter, style, and meaning can only truly be understood by me.  The process of making a piece--the motivation behind it, the choices and changes I've made--can only be appreciated by me.  I do not make my art for the masses, I make it because of an irrepressible need to express something.  I cannot respect the makers of "decorative" art.  I do not call them artists.  They paint a tree in golds and greens and reds because those are the popular colors and a furniture store will sell it because it matches the couch or the bedspread.
Like the girl, I discovered early on how important art is.  Art taught me things about myself I couldn't learn anywhere else.  Like the girl, I shied away from art I didn't understand or that made me uncomfortable.  I was quick to judge.  As I became more exposed to various styles of art, I learned to appreciate that which had challenged what I thought I knew.  It taught me not to judge too quickly for everything I "knew" to be true could turn on a dime.
The last quote brought me back to my early childhood when I was learning to read.  I remember being a very active child.  I remained an athlete into my early twenties and therefore always felt comfortable in my body and with my body.  My mind was another matter.  I learned to read before I entered kindergarten, but  I remember being close to tears at one of my first attempts reading a book about dinosaurs.  No one was around to translate at that moment.  I knew the letters and the sounds they made, but could not make sense of those foreign shapes that were words.  I stared at the page and stared at the page.  I went outside, seeking that familiarity of my body in nature.  I threw the ball against the brick wall outside the kitchen window.  I ran down the grassy hill in our backyard to the maple tree that I could not climb for I was much too small.  Meeting with yet another obstacle, I decided to go back inside to have another crack at the dinosaur book.  I stared at the page.  And the words slowly became clear.  And what words they were!  Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Brachiosaurus, Triceratops.  No C-A-T for me!  Who thought this was a good book for children learning to read?  Still, once those "harsh, closed letters sang into being", I was a goner.  Trying to separate me from my books is s futile endeavor.   Now, instead of art teaching me things about myself, I rely on literature and, in turn, my writing about it to set me on paths to discovery.  I will end on two final notes/quotes, I've stolen from Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man:

Women don't tell the truth about themselves...Or else the truth is genuinely pure, involving no second-guessing--in which case, who could stand to hear it?
[who indeed?]   

Alex heard two voices together, two opposite voices, and from such extreme poles of his mind that for a moment his brain refused to reconcile them.          
Welcome to my world.