The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment...
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...
So the first thing about the history of rhyme . . . is that it’s all happened before. It’s all part of these huge rhymeorhythmic circles of exuberance and innovation and surfeit and decay and resurrec...
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.
And now I'm back outside again sitting in the white plastic chair looking at the dew on the gas cap of my car. A fly wants to bit me on the ankle. The mosquitoes are all asleep. They're just not out a...
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 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...
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...
Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.
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...
Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast.
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...
There is a feeble urgency behind all forced mannerisms of finery- haste and pomp cannot coincide.
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...
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...
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...
Anthology knowledge isn't real knowledge.
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...