Compelling
His voice was deep and resonant and somehow brave, like the voice of old-time American heroes and orators. Something earnest and strong and humanly hopeful I liked about him, while the other poets were either…
Category: World Literature
Four or Five Times in Life
“He smiled understandingly — much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It…
House of Hospitality
Every time he said this word monsieur, with his gently solemn, and heartily hospitable voice, the man’s countenance lighted up. Monsieur to a convict, is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst…
Taking Stock
What have we accomplished? Good new poetry, that oughta be enough. –Jack Kerouac, in The Letters, by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, 472
Today’s One-Liner (#340)
Everybody should simply make a vow of kindness and let it go at that, try to stay sober too—start new party Vow of Kindness party. –Jack Kerouac, in The Letters, by Jack Kerouac and Allen…
Today’s One-Liner (#336)
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. — Psalm 23, verse 4,…
Psalmophilia
How I cried out to you, my God, when I read the Psalms of David, those hymns of faith, those songs of a pious heart in which the spirit of pride can find no place!…
“What Is Literature?”
C. S. Lewis, who seems wiser the older I get, gave a series of lectures at Cambridge after transferring there from Oxford. These became An Essay on Criticism. As professor of Renaissance and Medieval Literature…
Today’s One-Liner (#327)
We always love to discuss and reveal character because human character is to us the greatest puzzle. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, in Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer, interviews by Richard Burgin, p. 47
Today’s One-Liner (#325)
I believe in Buddha kindness and nothing else, I believe in Heaven, in Angels, I eschew all Marxism and allied horseshit and psychoanalysis, and offshoot therefrom. –Jack Kerouac, Letter to Allen Ginsberg, January 1958