Today’s One-Liner (#67)
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it. –Ezra Pound, Make It New
Category: World Literature
Today’s One-Liner (#65)
I want to defend my culture, not theirs, and I inform you that I like Dante Alighieri and Shakespeare and Goethe and Verlaine and Walt Whitman and Leopardi much more than Omar Khayyam. –Oriana Fallaci,…
“What Dreams May Come”
These passages, with their rich imagery and their unerring rhythmic ebb and flow, are among the most moving and complex speeches in our literature. But it is the soliloquy in the third act, “To be…
Look Within
In a sense, everything Proust wrote was a rehearsal for the Search, but the important point—made clear by his many anguished doubts about whether or not he was a novelist—is that until he found the…
Today’s One-Liner (#60)
Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. –Staretz Zosima, “Of Prayer, Love, and the Touching of Other Worlds,” in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov Easter morning 2012, Chouteau AvenuePhoto by Andrew Wimmer
Today’s One-Liner (#59)
De même que les prêtres ayant la plus grande expérience du cœur, peuvent le mieux pardonner aux péchés qu’ils ne commettent pas, de même le génie ayant la plus grande expérience de l’intelligence peut le…
Share the Wealth
I am justified in preserving too many of Johnson’s sayings, than too few. –James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
This Is, Because That Is
It seemed as though he dared not kneel directly before God. Everything around him, this quiet garden, these balmy flowers, these children, shouting with joy, these meek and simple women, this silent cloister, gradually entered…
La Fin du Roman
Karamazov, s’écria Kolia, est-ce vrai ce que dit la religion, que nous ressusciterons d’entre les morts, que nous nous reverrons les uns les autres, et tous, et Ilioucha ? Oui, c’est vrai, nous ressusciterons, nous…
Thank You, Biographers!
Biography is, of the various kinds of narrative writing, that which is most eagerly read, and most easily applied to the purposes of life. –Samuel Johnson, The Idler, 84 in A Johnson Sampler, edited by…