a trail of crumbs

"the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs/that we follow across a page of fresh snow"

May 3rd 2012

By Elizabeth Dye, in Featured Seller: The English Dept. | The Etsy Blog

Posted at 11:05pm.

“
I am a toiler and very rarely have a lightning bolt “aha!” moment — there have been many small ones amid hours of experimentation and perserverance.
”

April 27th 2012

by Sherry Turkle, from The Flight From Conversation - NYTimes.com

Posted at 8:05pm.

“
Most of all, we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another.
”

April 23rd 2012

by Jill Lepore

from “Battleground America: One nation, under the gun;” The New Yorker; April 23, 2012

Posted at 12:02am.

“
As long as candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.
”

April 20th 2012

by Anne Lamott, from “And the Winner of the Pulitzer Isn’t” - NYTimes.com

Posted at 9:09pm.

“
Let me underscore the obvious here: Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.
”

April 20th 2012

the coming of light

by Mark Strand

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.

From The Writer’s Almanac on April 20, 2012.

Posted at 9:30am and tagged with: one column,.

March 19th 2012

by Dwight Garner, from “The Way We Read Now,” New York Times

Posted at 9:39pm.

“
The smartphone has clearly been recent technology’s greatest gift to literacy. Carrying one obliterates one’s greatest fear: of being trapped somewhere — a train, the D.M.V., a toilet — with nothing whatsoever to read.
”

March 12th 2012

“A Girl Who Reads” by Mark Grist, via MarietteGemini

Posted at 11:23pm.

January 16th 2012

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Featured on what maisie knows during the week of January 15, 2012.

Posted at 5:34pm.

“
I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place, is taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better, and actually safer, than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it’s so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it. Well, I says to myself at last, I’m a-going to chance it; I’ll up and tell the truth this time, though it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you’ll go to.
”

January 10th 2012

Bill Watterson

Featured on what maisie knows during the week of January 8, 2012.

Posted at 8:58pm.

“
Getting an inch of snow is like winning 10 cents in the lottery.
”

January 10th 2012

Philip Levine

From The Writer’s Almanac.

Posted at 8:45pm.

“
It is the imagination that gives us poetry. When you sit down to write a poem, you really don’t know where you’re going. If you know where you’re going, the poem stinks, you probably already wrote it, and you’re imitating yourself.
”