Also discovered my inward happiness and my defensive armor of superficiality and gaiety.
So it may be that reading your work aloud will not only improveits quality but save your life in the process.
She told me the French expression [Esprit de l'escalier]—the spirit of the staircase—for the voice that catches up with you, minutes after the fact, to make fun of whatever you said and come up with t...
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.
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.
Vinegar of the interrogator with the oil of a flirt,
She lacks the nonchalance for conducting deep discussions;
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
One: See the two of them everywhere. Contemplate suicide. Would it seem too tourist-y to jump off the Eiffel Tower?
Love is strange was what everyone said. It was practically the club motto.
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...
I was only pretending to be the underpaid, duplicitous, ineffective, struggling teacher of immigrant French. The real Suzanne was the lover and muse of a brilliant artist.
Is starting to happen between the two teenagers: It gave me a queer feeling each time I looked into his deep blue eyes, and he sat there with that mysterious laugh playing round his lips…and with my w...
We don't know what we'd do. Nobody knows what accident of fate or DNA or character will determine how we act when the shit hits the fan.