All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are gong to come tumbling out before you. I'm going to divulge them. What a juicy work that is, 'divulge.' Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chine...
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...
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.
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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 fact that we had independently decided to sweep our apartments on that Sunday afternoon after spending the weekend together, I took as a strong piece of evidence that we were right for each other....
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...
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...
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...
One French guy at a bar wanted several of us to faire le parachutisme. He said it was easy, you just jumped out of a plane. It sounded very exciting but no, thank you. He said I'm not a homo. I said i...
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...
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...
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...
Anthology knowledge isn't real knowledge.
That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.
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