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...
So it may be that reading your work aloud will not only improveits quality but save your life in the process.
So perhaps the correct conclusion is that Green was less attuned to how people when they speak - the actual words and expressions they employ - than to what they . This notion of dialogue as a pure e...
There were many occasions on which I had to skim as rapidly as I could to get through those survey courses that gave us two weeks to finish Don Quixote, ten days for War and Peace, courses designed to...
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...
Staying awake seemed like a gift until, as so often happens with gifts, it became a burden.
Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things. Stories aren’t about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.
Teaching students to value literary masterpieces is our best hope of awakening them to the infinite capacities and complexities of human experience, of helping them acknowledge and accept complexity a...
That’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered.
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.
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...
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...
There are some people who remain your best friends even if you haven’t seen them for ages, and others with whom you start from scratch every time.
Decision. I was tired of his jealousy, sick of his belief that the only permissible topic of conversation was his unrecognized genius.
She lacks the nonchalance for conducting deep discussions;
To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent...
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...
You know who they wanted to play Rick? Aaron asked.I shook my head. Why was I so tense? Didn't Aaron's question prove that we were just a couple of old-movie fans swapping Hollywood trivia gossip?Rona...
Good writing should be grasped at once—in a second.
What’s strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great...
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