Elizabeth Janeway
Elizabeth Janeway
Elizabeth Janewaywas an American author and critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 October 1913
CountryUnited States of America
change eye world
If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.
change enemy legends
Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.
change powerful fear
power is not a thing to be owned. But if you believe that it is such a thing, losing it becomes a possibility to fear. That fear, I think, is one reason for the dark projections of a catastrophic future that are so widespread, in our dual society. The present powerful, being committed to polarization, expect that any new deal will overturn the one that set them in authority; that the last shall be first and the first last, role reversal everywhere, men as slaves, women as masters, in a revolution of contradiction.
trying authenticity guilty
Unless I am what I am and feel what I feel - as hard as I can and as honestly and truly as I can - then I am nothing. Let me feel guilty ... don't try to educate me ... don't protect me.
philosophical wine world
Creeds and causal systems have argued with each other for millennia, and even so we and our ancestors have managed to live in a world of differing opinions. Philosophical disputes don't often affect the price of fish or wine.
ability please
Power is the ability not to have to please.
powerful ideas ifs
If there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, there is nothing more ubiquitously pervasive than an idea whose time won't go.
art warning function
what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.
advice honest heroines
We older women who know we aren't heroines can offer our younger sisters, at the very least, an honest report of what we have learned and how we have grown.
power ideas finance
The idea of power as a possession, whose asset can be banked and drawn on when needed, comes easy to a society whose rules grow out of the methods of finance capitalism.
contemplative-life people upset
I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It's wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being.
aging feels expected
We are in a double bind. We are expected to feel inferior not only as women, but because we are old.
baby power long
We haven't come a long way, we've come a short way. If we hadn't come a short way, no one would be calling us baby.
american-author deserves human race
The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.