She Gave an Onion
Dostoevsky was concerned lest his depiction be considered blasphemous, and he thus includes in his postscript “one small nota bene: please don’t imagine that I would allow myself, in a work of mine, even the…
Category: World Literature
Microscopic Goodness
Grushenka recounts a Russian folktale about a wicked woman who dies and is condemned to the burning lake. Pitying her, her guardian angel recalls that the woman did one good deed in her life: she…
Today’s One-Liner (#274)
Wicked as I am, I want to pray! –Grushenka, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 8:8
Resurrecting the Frozen Heart
“Brother, in these past two months I’ve sensed a new man in me, a new man has arisen in me! He was shut up inside me, but if it weren’t for this thunderbolt, he never…
Today’s One-Liner (#273)
I looked with deep tenderness, and for the first time in my life I consciously received the first seed of the word of God in my soul. ––Starets Zosima, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Today’s One-Liner (#272)
Yet who can tell how many times each day our curiosity is tempted by the most trivial and insignificant matters? –Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin
Today’s One-Liner (#271)
We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinion, because we very often differ from ourselves. –Samuel Johnson, Adventurer 107, cited in Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson…
The Pleasure of Aphorisms
As most of the little book’s exegetes remark, the story [of Rasselas]–to term it so–is a thread upon which an extraordinary number of powerful adagio are precariously arranged in series. Johnson once remarked that he…
Today’s One-Liner (#266)
[Samuel Johnson] used the conventions and mechanisms of Grub Street—writing rapidly, writing to order, writing in a standard genre—to generate literature, happily defined by Ezra Pound as “news that stays news.” –Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson…
Preserving Potency
Writing to Simone, Proust requested her photograph, as he had her mother’s not so long ago without success. He explained to Simone the importance photographs had for him: “I shall think of you even without…