Love is what you've been through with somebody.
Friday, February 16, 2024
Monday, December 18, 2023
An explanation of some kind ... is necessary—however absurd—to the happiness of every individual who seeks to do his duty in the world and face the problems of life.
Algernon Blackwood, The Willows
Sunday, November 26, 2023
We think time travels forward, marches on in a straight line, and so we hurry alongside it to keep up. Hurry, hurry, mustn’t fall behind. But it doesn’t, you see. Time just swirls around us. Everything is always present. The things we’ve done, the people we’ve loved, the people we’ve hurt, they’re all still here.... The lie of time. Everything I’ve done and everything I’ve been is present in the same place. But we still think the thing that has just happened, or is about to happen, we think that’s the most important thing. My memories aren’t memories, my present isn’t present, it’s all the same thing.
Richard Osman, The Last Devil To Die
Friday, December 23, 2022
It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life … that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces.
Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
Monday, June 06, 2022
From A Perfect June Day
Wednesday, February 09, 2022
From a wonderful and beautiful book
Life is hard. Everyone believes the world is ending all the time. But so far, all of them have been wrong.... The truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.
Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land
Saturday, January 22, 2022
[From] a line from Roberto Bolaño’s novel Distant Star: “…as if time were not a river but an earthquake happening nearby.” It’s an arresting thought: What if time’s ravages compelled our attention with the same ineluctable force as an earthquake? What if time were experienced not as a flow but as a phenomenon whose energy overcomes you, terrifies you, forces you to reach out in search of balance?
Jonathan Mingle, The Unimaginable Touch of Time (NYRB, February 10, 2022)
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
People without a sense of humor will never forgive you for being funny.
Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club
Tuesday, September 14, 2021
Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness….. It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass…. Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.
D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places
Monday, September 13, 2021
In current Catholic dogma, [purgatory] is a state of being rather than an actual realm between Hell and Heaven: an inner fire in the conscience of sinners that refines their impurities.
Judith Thurman, Reading Dante’s Purgatory While the World Hangs in the Balance, The New Yorker (September 13, 2021)
Tuesday, July 06, 2021
Tuesday, May 25, 2021
Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad.
Neal Stephenson, Seveneves
Thursday, March 25, 2021
A life is not such a tremendous time to learn to express your ideas.
Henry Adams
Saturday, July 11, 2020
Theodore Sturgeon in his wonderful short story, The Widget, The Wadget, and Boff
Saturday, December 28, 2019
Ted Chiang, Exhalation
Thursday, December 13, 2018
Michel de Montaigne
Monday, December 03, 2018
Montaigne on Death
Julius Canus, a noble Roman, of singular constancy and virtue, having been condemned to die by that worthless fellow Caligula, besides many marvellous testimonies that he gave of his resolution, as he was just going to receive the stroke of the executioner, was asked by a philosopher, a friend of his: “Well, Canus, whereabout is your soul now? what is she doing? What are you thinking of?”--“I was thinking,” replied the other, “to keep myself ready, and the faculties of my mind full settled and fixed, to try if in this short and quick instant of death, I could perceive the motion of the soul when she parts from the body, and whether she has any sentiment at the separation, that I may after come again if I can, to acquaint my friends with it.”
Michel de Montaigne
Thursday, August 09, 2018
Scott D. Sampson, Dismiss dinosaurs as failures...and pave a path to a bleak future