Every month I like to add a new quote, from something I have read or heard, to the inspiration section at the bottom of my site. Here is the inspiration for February; it comes from author Zadie Smith in her book, Changing My Mind – Occasional Essays.

Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own. To this end I find myself placing a cautious faith in the difficult partnership between reader and writer, that discrete struggle to reveal an individual’s experience of the world through the unstable medium of language.

Here is last month’s quote:

I began to feel that aftermath is the terrain of the essay. I still feel that the essay, or nonfiction in general, is a great space to think about what happens afterward, that it allows the writer to work with a large swath of time, with the roots of events and with their wide repercussions.

-Aviya Kushner , from article in the journal MARY