Practice is important because you learn to write by writing. No one ever learned to write in any other way.
English Composition and Grammar, John Warriner (via nickmiller)
I am INCREDIBLY excited for the Fall semester…
…because here is the book list for my “Contemporary Novels” class:
Virgin Suicides
Lolita
On the Road
Fight Club
The Road
I am getting all nerdy and giddy now.
A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful. Even as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember the joy of the book, the beauty of the binding. The smelling of the interior. Happy.
Maurice Sendak (via bookporn)
“The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”
—Homer, fromThe Iliad, translated by Richmond Lattimore (The University of Chicago Press, 1951)
(Source: hellanne)
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s advice to his 11-year old daughter, Scottie
(via Lists of Note)
Out of Print Book Club: The Great Gatsby is this Thursday, Jan 26th.
A new book recreates the story behind one of England’s greatest love affairs â the 17-year relationship between Charles II and Nell Gwyn. Charles Beauclerk is a direct descendant of the pair, and delved into family archives for the inside story.
what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer’s lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man
what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of thing
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
—whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it’s they shall cry hello to the spring
what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn’t:blow death to was)
—all nothing’s only our hugest home;
the most who die, the more we live
“Inscription for a Gravestone,” by Robinson Jeffers
I am not dead,
I have only become inhuman:
That is to say,
Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities,
But not as a man
Undresses to creep into bed,
but like an athlete
Stripping for the race.
The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer
Of certain fictions
Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain
And expand with pleasure;
Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope:
That’s gone, it is true;(I never miss it; if the universe does,
How easily replaced!)
But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free.
I admired the beauty
While I was human, now I am part of the beauty.
I wander in the air,
Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean;
Touch you and Asia
At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises
And the glow of this grass.
I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth
For a love-token.
The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.
T.S. Eliot (via yourathenaeum)
Reblog or Like if you agree that this bit part actor from “The Four Of Us Are Dying” (episode fourteen of our podcast) looks like a young GWB. I’m trying to win a bet with John. - Fred
I can’t believe I’m reblogging this. What has happened to my life?
