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…
Category: World Literature
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
Today’s One-Liner (#324)
The great authors, those to whom we go back again and again throughout our lives, Shakespeare and Dante, for example, are inexhaustible. –Ralph McInerny, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You: My Life and Pastimes,…
Take Your Pick
What is the essence of Christ’s ministry? He teaches men “not to commit stupidities.” All of Tolstoy’s brutal empiricism and aristocratic impatience resound in that extraordinary answer. The Dostoevskyan Christ, on the contrary, teaches men…