“It was rather perfect, one of those heavenly summer days when the sky is clear and the breeze is light and warm, and you just know there’s something exciting waiting around the corner…”
—The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton
May 2013
2 posts
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The grand scheme of a life, maybe (just maybe), is not about knowing or not knowing, choosing or not choosing. Perhaps what is truly known can’t be described or articulated by creativity or logic, science or art — but perhaps it can be described by the most authentic and meaningful combination of the two: poetry: As Robert Frost wrote, a poem “begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.”
I recommend the following course of action for those who are just beginning their careers or for those like me, who may be reconfiguring midway through: heed the words of Robert Frost. Start with a big, fat lump in your throat, start with a profound sense of wrong, a deep homesickness, or a crazy lovesickness, and run with it.
” —Debbie Millman, Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and DesignApril 2013
6 posts
“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
—Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
“Maybe it’s been only a brief separation that feels like years. Like a solo car ride that takes all night but feels like a lifetime. Watching all those highway dashes flying by at seventy miles an hour, your eyes becoming lazy slits and your mind wandering over the memory of a whole lifetime—past and future, childhood memories to thoughts of your own death—until the numbers on the dashboard clock do not mean anything anymore. And then the sun comes up and you get to your destination and the ride becomes the thing that is no longer real, because that surreal feeling has vanished and time has become meaningful again.”
—The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick
“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”
—A bit of baseball romance on this Opening Day
March 2013
14 posts
“But doesn’t every previous era feel like fiction once it’s gone?”
—The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
“In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.”
—On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
Overall I’m not a fan of Kerouac’s frenzied writing style, but every so often I came across a gem like this one in On the Road— a great passage that perfectly encapsulates the temporary insanity of punch-drunk love.
Overall I’m not a fan of Kerouac’s frenzied writing style, but every so often I came across a gem like this one in On the Road— a great passage that perfectly encapsulates the temporary insanity of punch-drunk love.
“The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones.”
—The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
