Subject of Thought Number of Times Thought Occurred per Year (in descending order)L. 580.0Family 400.0Brushing tongue 150.0Earplugs 100.0Bill-paying 52.0Panasonic three-wheeled vacuum cleaner, greatne...
Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct...
So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of b...
Notes of joy have a special STP solvent in them that dissolves all the gluey engine deposits of heartache. War and woe don't have anything like the range and reach that notes of joy do.
In 1855, as the price of paper rose, Dr. Deck proposed to dig up 2 1/2 million tons of Egyptian mummies, ship them to New York, unroll them; and use their linen wrappings to make paper.
I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.
I made an egg salad sandwich and took a bite of it over the open silverware drawer. A piece of egg salad fell in among the forks. I swore softly with my mouth full. Another piece of egg salad fell in.
Sometimes it's hard to tell the truth because the truth is hard to see, because it exists in a misty, gray non-space between two strongly charged falsehoods that sound true but aren't.
Though simple, the trick was something that struck me as useful . Thus, the 'when I was little' nostalgia was misleading: it turned something that I was taking seriously as an adult into something sou...
They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics...
The two plants had a gentleman's agreement going, like the railroad companies and the real-estate speculators in the old days, whereby they progressed together up the hill and into the yard.
The great scholarly or anecdotal footnotes of Lecky, Gibbon, or Boswell, written by the author of the book himself to supplement, or even correct over several later editions, what he says in the prima...
In old stapled problems, you can see the TB vaccine marks in the upper left corner where the staples have been removed and replaced, as the problem - even the staple holes of the problem - was copied...
At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine pe...
And I'll flip through the newest issue, walking back from my blue mailbox, hunting for the poem he chose over mine, and it'll be the same thing as always. The prose will have pulled back, and the poem...
The meanness that first bothered me, though, when I encountered it a decade ago, long before I was married, was in a short story in in which a young husband returns with hamburgers and eats them happ...
The Bombay Chronicle asked Mohandas Gandhi what he thought of the fact that the United States was now in the war. It was December 20, 1941. 'I cannot welcome this entry of America,' Gandhi said. 'By h...
There's something narcissistic in the phrase collected poems. Who's collecting them? The poem. How hard is that? That's not a real collection. Now if he had made a collection of water fountains, or of...
There is a feeble urgency behind all forced mannerisms of finery- haste and pomp cannot coincide.
As it happened, the first three major advances in my life—and I will list all the advances here—1. shoe-tying2. pulling up on Xs3. steadying hand against sneaker when tying4. brushing tongue as well as...