The Resolute Woman

Author: resolutewoman

  • Where is the madness?

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    resolutewoman
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    Tara Westover wrote the words “everywhere—consciously, compulsively” as she tried to come to terms with her family. “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?” she wrote. Westover talks about her family in her amazing book Educated. She grew up in a survivalist family in Idaho.  Even though she had never seen a…

  • Self-creation

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    resolutewoman
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    Tara Westover grew up in a survivalist family in Idaho.  Even though she had never seen a doctor and had never sat in a classroom when she started college, she earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge in 2014. Westover came to believe “that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was…

  • Proper work

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    resolutewoman
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    “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work,” the poet Mary Oliver once wrote.

  • Something particular and real

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    Mary Oliver, who died last month, wrote “often of mortality, but with a spirit of gratitude and completion,” her obituary stressed. The poet once wrote: When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder If I have made of my life something particular and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full…

  • Good-bye, Mary Oliver

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    resolutewoman
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    Some of my favorite quotes come from Mary Oliver, who died earlier this month. And, my favorite quotes must be the favorites of many others because a quick search online found three of my favorites at the top of a list of the poet’s quotes. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with…

  • Legions of half-truths

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    resolutewoman
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    “Our minds are constantly being invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices and false facts,” Martin Luther King Jr. said. “One of the great needs of mankind (and womankind) is to be lifted above the morass of false propaganda.” We need to think, King emphasized. We need “a tough mind and a tender heart.” We found…

  • True peace

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    resolutewoman
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    Peace “as the world commonly understands it comes when the summer sky is clean and the sun shines in scintillating beauty, when the pocketbook is full, when the mind and body are free of ache and pain,” Martin Luther King Jr. said. But, true peace, he added, “is a calmness of soul amid terror of…

  • Radiant hope

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    resolutewoman
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    We must avoid both “superficial optimism” and “crippling pessimism,” Martin Luther King Jr. emphasized. Instead, we need “a radiant hope,” he wrote in his book A Gift of Love.

  • An inescapable network of mutuality

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    resolutewoman
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    “In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men (and women) are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly,” Martin Luther King once said. We found this quote in Martin Luther King’s book A Gift of Love.

  • Create meaning

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    resolutewoman
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    After tragedy, you don’t find meaning, Elaine Pagels, a professor at Princeton, told an audience at Arts & Letters Live in Dallas recently. “You create meaning.” Pagels writes about the death of her 6-1/2-year-old son and her husband in her new book Why Religion?