2 Quotes by Marilyn McEntyre

But the more I see of the damage simplistic thinking can do, the more I admire and cling to John Keats's notion of "negative capability" which he defined as the capacity to dwell in ambiguity or paradox without any "irritable reaching after fact and reason." To allow room for wonder, speculation, uncertainty.

The final lines of one of Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets ... have stayed with me as a valuable standard against which to measure my motives when I write and teach hoping to keep my work relational, and to do it with a servant's heart:'Love in the open hand, nothing but that ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt, as one would give you cowslips in a hat swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt, I bring you, calling out, as children do, 'Look what I have! - And these are all for you.