Today’s One-Liner (#77)
Where there is hatred, let me sow love. –St. Francis of Assisi
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Today’s One-Liner (#76)
“She has a rare quality of taking full responsibility in the moment for everything she does and says.” –Grigory Dashevsky, quoted in Maria Stepanova’s introduction to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, Everyman’s Library, 2023
Dear Annie and Lindsay
I was earlier going through a 2016-17 Moleskine commonplace book I kept, and came across the following passages I transcribed from Harold Bloom’s book, How to Read and Why. I hope you may enjoy at…
Gratitude Reminder
It is amazing in all the different ways we can be thankful here on Earth. We can be thankful for our coat that keeps us warm. For the butterflies that pollinate the pretty flowers. We…
Share the Wealth with Cait Stevenson: A People’s History of Medieval Women Mystics
(or, “Dear Lord, help me drink less wine so I don’t lose my temper”) Cait fell in love with medieval women’s mysticism during her MA at SLU when she realized they would be a much…
Today’s One-Liner (#75)
I only quote others to make myself more explicit. –Michel de Montaigne, Essays, On the education of children, translated by J.M. Cohen
Saving One’s Own Skin in the Soviet Union
But it scarcely matters who actually signed the sentence–in those years everybody readily signed whatever was put before them. This was not only because they feared they would otherwise at once be dispatched to the…
Today’s One-Liner (#74)
Think, when you look at people, at their recent birth, their childhood, or their imminent death—and you will love them: such frail creatures. –Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), A Voice from the Chorus
The Demise of Kindness
There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in…
Today’s One-Liner (#73)
If you can’t get out of it, get into it. –Patricia Ryan Madson, Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up, 11.