Words that inspired you or changed your perspective?

Oddly, the book 'looking for alaska' really changed the way I think about a lot of things.

Daniel… great question. Hmm... I spent quite some time staring intently at my bookcase, trying very hard to pinpoint singular pieces of work which have caused me to change my perspective. But, oh how I failed!

Not that my opinions and outlook have never undergone modification… they have… many a times… radically so! They have gone through overhauls and revolutions!

But change has always been gradual for me. I think words are most effective when they creep up on you quietly, subtly… when they take time to register; they become effective and all-consuming only after you’ve had the opportunity to ponder, and to challenge and reject previously held biases.

Anyway… I’m rambling! What I’m trying to say, rather laboriously I know, is that I cannot recall an instance when a poem, quote or song lyric has made me stop dead in my tracks, hurl my perspective out the window and don a new pair of glasses. I think it’s been more of a collective effort – a library of works molding me to think in the direction I do now.

But I guess I should at least list one of those collective works should'nt I? One writer that I’m currently preoccupied with is Anais Nin. She wrote sensationally lurid erotica… which is what she's most famous for and it's nice I’m sure (not that *I* would know, haha)… but I simply cannot get over her other less erotic work! I’ve been reading what I can find online in quotes and excerpts... and she rouses me!! She is unashamedly, defiantly feminine – she writes gorgeously about love, and loneliness, and the banalities of life – through quotes alone she’s inspired me!

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken."

ok