The past, now.
- Marilynne Robinson
“For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone.”
“It is one of the best traits of people that they love where they pity. And this is more true of women than of men. So they get themselves drawn [...]
- Surrender, slavery, and Christ
“The most beautiful life possible has always seemed to me to be one where everything is determined, either by the pressure of circumstances or by impulses…, and where there is never any room for choice.” — Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest
“Finally, let it be said that to surrender oneself to the will of others [...]
- The Velveteen Rabbit
[This passage from Margery Williams'The Velveteen Rabbit has been a favorite since my mother read it to me as a child, and the older I get, the more impossible it becomes to read through it without sobbing. I'm both proud (because it further confirms how wonderful they are) and annoyed (because I didn't think of [...]
- E. E. Cummings
(A favorite from about age 15, this poem was one with which I particularly identified. I registered intensefragility.com ages ago, and still own it, though I’ve never really done anything with it. When I was around 18, I paid a calligrapher to draw the Chinese characters for “intense fragility” for me, with an eye toward [...]
- St. Paul
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not Love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophesy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not [...]
- Mary Robison
“Sex, at my place, in silence, and under a sheet.
Not silence. I can still hear muffled car honks and brakes and tires, the next door neighbor’s cat, and laughter now from some huddle of men, a National Guard helicopter going over, the air fan, the plumbing’s rumble, the bed when we move, a child somewhere [...]
- Virginia Woolf
On making art:
“She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in her hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge or [...]
- Latin
For me, a breakthrough in reading Latin came when I let go of the idea that I needed to know the meaning of each word before I could analyze the structure of the sentence. It is much more helpful to start from the grammar, then tackle the vocabulary.
Compared to learning a modern language, learning [...]
- Flannery O’Connor
I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have [...]
- Watchmen
(From my essay “Remembering the future: Time and memory in the Mars chapters of Watchmen,” 10 pages.)
Unlike dismantling weapons with one’s mind, which only he is able to do, Jon (Dr. Manhattan) seems to think that even ordinary humans are quite capable of perceiving time in the way he does (even, perhaps, of seeing the [...]
