Quote for Today: Alexander McCall Smith
Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, …
40 days of poetry: Day 18: Peas by Annie Schmidt
Day 18: Peas by Annie Schmidt, translated by J.H. and J.W. Prins. It’s funny how memory changes the nature of our experience. Our elders are very dear to us.
Quote for Today: Herbert Muschamp
A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first-rate landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who …
40 days of poetry: Music Swims Back to Me: Anne Sexton
40 days of poetry: Day 13. Today I’m reading Music Swims Back to Me, by Anne Sexton, about her experience being institutionalized for mental illness. Simultaneously clear and murky, it …
Quote for Today: Jill Christman
Those books, pasted together by my grandmother, year after year, replaced the cognitive exercise of memory for me. Sitting on a section of wall-to-wall carpeting, drinking the bubbling red birch …
Quote for Today: Haruki Murakami
The whiff of ocean on the southern breeze and the smell of burning asphalt brought back memories of summers past. It had seemed as though those sweet dreams of summer …
Quote for Today: Samantha Schutz
I visit him a few times downtown while he paints. We talk about how he’s going to Spain for the fall semester and he shows me a painting he …
Quote for Today: Chaim Potok
For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause …
Quote for Today: Glenn Haybittle
I thought of that lost book and all the memories it held and how it was just one of millions of objects in the world loaded with secret history which …
Quote for Today: Edmund de Waal
Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no …