The ocean knew where her sailor was. We have seen him, said the waves. He is sleeping with us. You will never kiss his lips or feel the weight of his body again.
That’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered.
Sometimes only in retrospect do we realize that we have wasted our best years looking for a lost, inappropriate first love, that our life-changing passion for a particular person was no more than the...
Love is strange was what everyone said. It was practically the club motto.
From the earliest passages to the diary’s final entry, in which she talks about her dual personality, the lighthearted, superficial side that lies in wait to ambush and push away her better, deeper, a...
Who would you rather live with, a bunch of bonobos feeling good? Or chimpanzees eating each other's babies? Or humans waterboarding each other and destroying the planet?
Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class—or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer...
There it sat under my skull with my mind gripped in its tentacles. Sometimes dormant. Sometimes awakening and squeezing. Again I would react,
The repetitions, meaningless expressions, stammers, and nonsensical monosyllables with which we express hesitation, along with the clichés and banalities that constitute so much of everyday conversati...
So it may be that reading your work aloud will not only improveits quality but save your life in the process.
Read your work aloud, if you can, if you aren't too embarrassed by the sound of your voice ringing out when you are alone in a room. Chances are that the sentence you can hardly pronounce without stum...
Perhaps Aquinas’s notably soft line on gluttony may have had something to do with the fact that the saint was said to have had what today we might call a weight problem.
People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.
One: See the two of them everywhere. Contemplate suicide. Would it seem too tourist-y to jump off the Eiffel Tower?
I’ve always thought that a close-reading course should at least be a companion, if not an alternative, to the writing workshop. Though it also doles out praise, the workshop most often focuses on what...
In the spring of 2007, a staging of Kesselman’s version, directed by Tina Landau at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, seems to have maximized its potential.
If he looks at me with those eyes that laugh and wink, then it’s just as if a little light goes on inside me.
If I were like Lionel, I would write a book: Obvious Lies, Bad Advice, and Wrong Information I’ve Gotten from Men. A book? An encyclopedia! But in this case my friend was right.
With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it's essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly i...
Paris is an insomniac’s heaven. There is always something to photograph, something hidden in the shadows. One can see so much more in the darkness than in the light of day.