Through recent engaging conversation with Andrew Ivers at the Courtesy Diner, I became re-interested in Joan Didion, whose book The Year of Magical Thinking I read when it came out. Andrew has agreed to share…
Lovers of God do not belong to any caste. –Sri Ramakrishna, in M., The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
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
A healthy ego is transformed into a soul only via the burden of another who must impinge on the ego, causing the ego to shrink, as it were. –Ira F. Stone, A Responsible Life: The…
When I know I can change things, I become as active as a cyclone. –Golda Meir, in Oriana Fallaci, Interviews with History and Conversations with Power
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,…
Dullness was not an inevitable consequence of age, but of education. –Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
So what If I sing your praises(even off-key)? I know your wordsHave the powerTo raise the dead. Recall this when you feel Your life is fated To be locked in a lab.
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…
I believe in God—Bach’s God. –Glenn Gould, in Kevin Bazzana, Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould