February 2010
14 posts
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January 2010
27 posts
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“Mummy is very good about parties. She never puts everything on the table and she never invites people. She knows that the only thing that really creates the right atmosphere is improvisation. Improvisation is a beautiful word. Daddy has to go out and look for his pals. They might be anywhere at any time. Sometimes he doesn’t find anybody. But often he does. And they feel like...
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“You can close your mind to things if something is important enough. It works very well. You make yourself very small, shut your eyes tight and say a big word over and over again until you’re safe.”
- Tove Jansson, “The Stone”, Sculptor’s Daughter
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“This glorious creation of a child-self, with all her cowardice, her jealousies, her funniness, her witty willfulness, her precocious understanding of the mechanics of art and her unprejudiced filtering of the adult wisdoms fed to her, is the perfect literary voice.”
- Ali Smith on Tove Jansson, Introduction to A Winter Book
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“If the library is, as Borges put it, a model of the universe, we must try to...”
– Umberto Eco, “De Bibliotheca”
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“…they were not—and had never been—energetic people, but were, to be honest,...”
– from Bed by Tao Lin (via similarfrowns) (via heheheheheheheeheheheehehe)
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“In Troy, [Wisconsin], God was mind-clutter: a cross between a billboard, a...”
– Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go →
Article from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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Library of Congress Puts Thousands of Historic... →
“Nearly 60,000 books prized by historians, writers and genealogists, many too old and fragile to be safely handled, have been digitally scanned as part of the first-ever mass book-digitization project of the U.S. Library of Congress (LOC), the world’s largest library.”
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“She watched him, his eminently intelligent wife. He pulled her closer to make...”
– Maile Meloy, “The Children”, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It
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Seven year old Sophia decides to write a book, titled A Study of Angleworms That Have Come Apart. She dictates to her grandmother:
“It goes on like this: The worm probably knows that if it comes apart, both halves will start growing separately. Space. But we don’t know how much it hurts. And we don’t know, either, if the worm is afraid it’s going to hurt. But anyway,...
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“It was a tiny kitten when it came and could drink its milk only from a nipple. Fortunately, they still had Sophia’s baby bottle in the attic. In the beginning, the kitten slept in a tea cozy to keep warm, but when it found its legs they let it sleep in the cottage in Sophia’s bed. It had its own pillow, next to hers. It was a gray fisherman’s cat and it grew fast. One day, it left the...
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Learn your damn homophones →