Category: World Literature

Today’s One-Liner (#41)

With her formidable intellect, her wide-ranging knowledge of languages, literatures, philosophy and science, she was the greatest woman of the century.  –Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life

Next Door

Such people do not realize that by alleviating the suffering of those before your eyes, practicing benevolence and living rightly, our good influence will extend far beyond.  –Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness, translated by Meredith McKinney…

Today’s One-Liner (#39)

« Dire que j’ai gâché des années de ma vie, que j’ai voulu mourir, que j’ai eu mon plus grand amour, pour une femme qui ne me plaisait pas, qui n’était pas mon genre !…

Today’s One-Liner (#37)

One advantage of knowing the classics is that no matter the what situation you might find yourself in, you’ll remember that someone else was there before you. –Kenneth Rexroth, quoted in Anne Waldman and Laura…

Writing and Reading Inter-Are/2

Johnson made such chains of learned reference in his writing, and his written works are the outgrowth of the kind of reading Johnson did, in which fragments of writing can be distributed under preexisting topics…

Isn’t This the Truth?

It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, a book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.  —Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness, translated by…

Know Your Purpose

By refusing to distract himself from the main task, by jealously guarding his energies for what really mattered, [Arthur] Waley was able to produce his vast corpus of work. Title is a key theme in…

From Antigone to Thich Nhat Hanh

Teach us to care and not to care…T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday Over the years when reading Sophocles’ Antigone, I tended to see her as the conscientious heroine, standing alone against her uncle Creon, the brutal…