A Quote by Susie Dent

My work, my love of words, became my refuge, both when I was working on bilingual dictionaries for Oxford University Press and then via my involvement with 'Countdown' - and now 'Catsdown,' as I call it.
Oxford is a funny place, as it is a mixture of town and gown. You have the students at the main university and at Oxford Brookes, but there is also a big working-class community.
I was invited. Oxford University Press is simply as prestigious a press as there is so when they come to your door and invite you to be a part of something like this, you say yes. It truly is an honor to work with them, particularly on a project as large as this one. The story of how they came to me is a good lesson though about the unexpected and creating new opportunities.
Words have always been political, and that means that, in many people's minds, dictionaries are political. Because that's what dictionaries do: they do words.
I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, of even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.
I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.
There was no press involvement, there was no pressure. Life was very pure and it became more complicated.
From my teenage years on, I sought out Native elders from many tribal nations and listened to their words. I also started a small press, The Greenfield Review Press, and became very involved with publishing the work of other American Indian authors, especially books of poetry.
I was brought up bilingual, but there came a point where my mom went back to work and I got a white babysitter, so sadly I lost it. Now I can understand Spanish and put words together, but I don't speak it fluently. I'm ashamed of that.
I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.
I wish I'd gone to university. I had the opportunity to go to Oxford but by then I'd already started as a comedian.
Journalists used to be obsessed with working at a New York magazine or newspaper or TV network. Now the entire industry is obsessed with going viral and how words will be received via social media.
If you really want to make a difference you don't do it via Tweet, via Facebook, via Instagram - you get down, you understand what the facts are and then you offer a path forward.
I recommend Doug Sweeney's recent book [Jonathan] Edwards the Exegete (Oxford University Press, 2015), which is a terrific treatment of the way in which Edwards was steeped in the Bible, so that it shaped the whole of his thinking.
music became my refuge and then my salvation.
Sometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art.
Therefore, be islands unto yourselves. Be your own refuge. Have recourse to none else for refuge. Hold fast to the Dharma as a refuge. Resort to no other refuge. Whosoever, either now or after I am gone, shall be islands unto themselves, shall seek no eternal refuge, it is they, among my disciples who shall reach the very topmost height! But they must be keen to progress.
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