Today’s One-Liner (#18)
I remember when I lived in Boston reading all of Dostoyevsky’s novels one right after the other. –Joe Brainard, I Remember
Month: July 2024
Things Fall Apart
I had returned to China looking for my old country. I found an even older and more decrepit one. It called itself new and belittled everything old, such as courtesy, culture, civilization. No one under…
Today’s One-Liner (#17)
Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night. –Bruce Springsteen, Thunder Road
Start Where We Are
Why exactly is sudden transformation according to a model impossible? The same question can be asked about individuals: why can’t someone just become what she admires? Disgusted with her life, Tolstoy’s Kitty, as we have…
Today’s One-Liner (#16)
Sometimes I think that pain is a bridge between people, a secret connection; other times, it seems like an abyss. –Svetlana Alexeievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, translated by Bela Shayevich.
Give This a Shot over the Next Few Months
We all can render a great service by listening to opposing opinions without agitation, discourtesy, or violence, and by offering our opinions not as nonnegotiable demands but as calm, courteous statements. –Eknath Easwaran, The End…
Today’s One-Liner (#15)
The only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles. –Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope: A Memoir
Invitations and Incitements
I think it’s best to see Walt, and virtually every other imaginative writer of consequence, as issuing not edicts but invitations. Walt asks us to make his words ours, his vision our own….you can respond…
Today’s One-Liner (#14)
Everything is impermanent, even my teeth. –Munindra, in Mirka Knaster, Living This Life Fully: Stories and Teachings of Munindra
Advice to a Young Person on Keeping a Journal
Let her review her journal often, and set down what she finds herself to have omitted, that she may trust to memory as little as possible, for memory is soon confused by a quick succession…