Reads tagged with “books”

James Baldwin on Reconciling Acceptance and Action

Notes on the change that begins in the heart.

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How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

“It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.”

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Music and the Body: Richard Powers on the Power of Song

“The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.”

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Sing, Don’t Scream: D.H. Lawrence on the Strength of Sensitivity

“Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.”

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Mushrooms: Cellist Zoë Keating Brings to Life Sylvia Plath’s Poem About the Tenacity of the Creative Spirit

“Our foot’s in the door.”

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How to Cherish Your Human Condition: The Poetic Naturalist Loren Eiseley on the Meaning of Life

“The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age.”

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Nick Cave on Creative Work as an Instrument of Self-Forgiveness and the Necessity of Hope in a Fragile World

In praise of “the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world.”

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First Kiss: An Animated Ode to One of Life’s Great Felicities

“…if the Great Mother rushed open the moon like a gift and you were there to feel your shadow finally unhooked from your wrist…”

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Henry Miller on Friendship and the Relationship Between Creativity and Community

“To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, one who never lets you down but who becomes more devoted, more reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience.”

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M.C. Escher on Loneliness, Creativity, and How Rachel Carson Inspired His Art, with a Side of Bach

“A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.”

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Reads tagged with “books”

Notes on the change that begins in the heart.

“It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.”

“The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.”

“Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.”

“Our foot’s in the door.”

“The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age.”

In praise of “the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world.”

“…if the Great Mother rushed open the moon like a gift and you were there to feel your shadow finally unhooked from your wrist…”

“To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, one who never lets you down but who becomes more devoted, more reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience.”

“A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.”

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