Secondary Literature
“There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”
― Margaret Atwood , MaddAddam (2013)
"[V]arious reports were received at home concerning the pastor’s sabbatical: rococo tales, adorned with every element but truth. It was not true that […] he had dressed himself in rags, rented three pitiful children, and was to be encountered daily by footloose tourists in a state of mendicant collapse before the Ritz hotel in Madrid; it was not true that he had stood the entire population of Malaga to drinks for three days and then conducted them on an experimental hike across the sea toward Africa, intending that the One he sought should manage it dry-shod; it was not true that he had married a hoary crone with bangles in her ears, proclaimed himself rightful heir to the throne of Abd-er-Rahman, and led an insurrection of the Moors on Cordoba. It was not even true that he had entered a Carthusian monastery as a novice."
- William Gaddis, The Recognitions (1955)
“The guardrails most people intuitively put in place around gossip mean that you will probably never know whether you were being gossiped about; you can only assume that you almost certainly have been, and will continue to be. I have heard such things only when the other person obviously hopes that what they are saying will get back to me, and so takes measures to float their vitriol in my direction.”
- Lauren Oyler, No Judgement: On Being Critical (2024)
“An academic who was forced out of her post said, ‘If people say things enough it becomes real.’ What is repeated acquires force. What people say about you becomes part of what you have to deal with. Even if you don’t know what is being said about you, even if you don’t know who is saying what, you can feel what is being said in how people react to you, speak to you, address you, in sideways glances, how you are dropped, the invitations you stop receiving, how you are dropped from texts, how they stop referring to your work, how they turn away when you turn up.”
- Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (2021)
