Karen Swallow Prior Quotes

“What good literature can do and does do-far greater than any importation of morality-is touch the human soul.”

— Karen Swallow Prior

“It is no coincidence that the term "voice" has come to mean in modern usage much more than just the sound made by the vocal organs, but also the means by which we make our individual selves known, not only to others but to ourselves. For the connection between the self and language is inseparable: it is through language that the self becomes.”

— Karen Swallow Prior

In so doing, I resisted the descent into what the school counselors called low self-esteem. Self-esteem is the dark, distorted shadow of self-possession. Self-esteem gazes inward and wills the inner eye to like what it sees; self-possession looks inward only long enough to take a measure then looks outward at the world in search of a fitting place-and settles for no less.

— Karen Swallow Prior

“I am so afraid that strangers with think me good! and there is a degree of hypocrisy in appearing much better than one is. - Hannah More”

— Karen Swallow Prior

It should be held as an eternal truth, that what is morally wrong can never be politically right.65

— Karen Swallow Prior

Her shift in thinking was clearly conflicted. It must have been difficult to disavow something for which she had a deep love and in which she had been immersed so much of her life.

— Karen Swallow Prior

“Books have formed the soul of me. I know that spiritual formation is of God, but I also know-mainly because I learned it from books-that there are other kinds of formation, too, everyday gifts, and that God uses the things of this earth to teach us and shape us, and to help us find truth”

— Karen Swallow Prior

“... the traditional family structure that More supported in her writings enabled women to 'be intelligent, rational, virtuous, and noble creatures, capable of great intellectual and moral achievements. They had the potential for immense influence on their husbands and sons, on their relations, their servants, and the poor.' More held, therefore, ... 'the ideal of rational domesticity helped to liberate the individual within a supportive family framework.”

— Karen Swallow Prior

“Furthermore, even these limited accomplishments should be obtained, Barbauld cautioned, "in a quiet and unobserved manner" for the display of knowledge by a woman is "punished with disgrace."6 Besides, the Monthly Review complained in a 1763 review, "intense thought spoils a lady's features."7”

— Karen Swallow Prior

“The topic was eloquence, something Christians had been conflicted about since the first-century church when Paul wrote that in bringing the gospel, he did not come with "eloquence." A few centuries later, Saint Augustine wrestled with the value of eloquence, associating it with his pagan background and training in Greek rhetoric while simultaneously employing it winsomely in his Christian writings. Such suspicion of beauty and form, whether in art, literature, speech, or human flesh, has shadowed Christian thought throughout the history of the church; sadly so, considering God is the author of all beauty.”

— Karen Swallow Prior

“... mischief, ... arises not from our living in the world, but from the world living in us; occupying our hearts, and monopolizing our affections.”

— Karen Swallow Prior

... evangelicals were instrumental in advancing the ideal of companionate marriage, one built on shared faith and mutual affection, a revolutionary notion in an era in which forced marriages were a not-so-distant memory.

— Karen Swallow Prior

God can carry on his own work, though all such poor tools as I were broken.

— Karen Swallow Prior

“Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts-eighteenth-century Reader's Digest were quite popular. More cautioned against a habit she viewed as cultivating a taste only for "delicious morsels," one that spits out "every thing which is plain." Good books, in contrast, require good readers: "In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of his work, that the judicious poet commonly reserves those flowers, whose beauty is defaced when they are plucked from the garland into which he had so skillfully woven them.”

— Karen Swallow Prior

“Honor, More charged, 'is the religion of tragedy.' Emotions such as love, hate, ambition, pride, and jealousy, 'form a dazzling system of worldly morality,' which contradicts 'the spirit of that religion whose characteristics are charity, meekness, peaceableness, longsuffering, gentleness, forgiveness.”

— Karen Swallow Prior

“Rather than majoring in frivolities, women should be educated in useful subjects and 'be furnished with a stock of ideas, and principles, and qualifications, and habits, ready to be applied and appropriated ... ' - Hannah More”

— Karen Swallow Prior