Today’s One-Liner (#30)
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. –Joan Didion, The White Album
Category: World Literature
Today’s One-Liner (#23)
Commonplace miracle: that so many commonplace miracles happen. –Wislawa Szymborska, “Miracle Fair”
One to One
Emerson never wrote for groups or classes or institutions; his intended audience was always the single hearer or reader. –Robert Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, xii
Writing and Reading Inter-Are/1
When a man writes from his own mind, he writes very rapidly. The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library…
Today’s One-Liner (#20)
Consider, Sir, how insignificant this will appear a twelve-month hence. –Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
Show Up Already
Even if you lack all faith, simply to seat yourself before an image, hold a rosary and take up a sutra book is to perform a virtuous act, however perfunctory, even seated on your meditation…
Today’s One-Liner (#18)
I remember when I lived in Boston reading all of Dostoyevsky’s novels one right after the other. –Joe Brainard, I Remember
Start Where We Are
Why exactly is sudden transformation according to a model impossible? The same question can be asked about individuals: why can’t someone just become what she admires? Disgusted with her life, Tolstoy’s Kitty, as we have…
Today’s One-Liner (#15)
The only good life is one in which there is no need for miracles. –Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope: A Memoir
Invitations and Incitements
I think it’s best to see Walt, and virtually every other imaginative writer of consequence, as issuing not edicts but invitations. Walt asks us to make his words ours, his vision our own….you can respond…