The Breathings of Your Heart

Always Ask Why

Why I Write

Shakespeare, The Tempest 

Another Voice

The Threshold

Joyous Nothing

On the Precipice of Six

- Lois Lowry, The Giver 

Firepower

- Emma Thompson,
The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: 
Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film 

Motherhood: A Week in the Life

The Conscience of the Blogger

The play's the thing 
wherein I'll catch
 the conscience of the king. 

- Shakespeare, Hamlet 

Surprised by Joy

- Charles Dickens, David Copperfield 

Gelatinous

Roots

Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie 

How To Be a Good Senior

Answers

Break, Break, Break

  - Alfred Lord Tennyson 

Marrying Agnes

The Metaphorical Bleed

All is Poetry

Weaving the Story Thread

First Year Guilt

Routine Comfort

Crying in the Chapel

If you cannot teach me to fly,

teach me to sing.

J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

The Cinderblocks Remember

Choice of Attention

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - 
is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. 
In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice 
and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

-W.H. Auden

Dear Diary

The Usual Suspects

The Geographical Lottery

The Broken Places

Vague Dancing Metaphors & Such

The Politicization of Plagiarism

Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own. 

- E.E. Cummings 

Ursula's Demand

Do not consider me now 
as an elegant female intending to plague you, 

but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart. 

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice 

Marching Orders

What does reason know?
Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Then & Now

Slab Work

Rage

I liked being a person.
I wanted to keep at it.

John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Round & Round

All go to one place: 
all are from the dust, 
and all return to dust.

Ecclesiastes 3:20  

The Indifference Death Knell

The Memory Pool

A Spoonful at a Time

Quiet Assertion

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves?
Even while we're still alive?
We wish to assert our existence, 
like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.


- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin  

Silver Linings

The Descent

- John Green, The Fault in Our Stars 

Grief That Does Not Speak

Vicissitude

The Wide World

The universe is wider than our views of it.

-Henry David Thoreau 

The Chain We Forge

"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling.

"Tell me why?"

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost.

"I made it link by link, and yard by yard, 

I girded it on of my own free will, 

and of my own free will I wore it."

-Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol 

Jealousy

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey'd monster,
which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

-Shakespeare, Othello

Nobody's Perfect

Backdraft

I took a deep breath 
and listened to the old brag of my heart.

I am, I am, I am.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

The Next Act

 It all seemed to him to have disappeared 
as if behind a curtain at a theater. 
There are such curtains that drop in life. 
God is moving on to the next act.

- Victor Hugo, Les Miserables 

My People

We shape our buildings; 

thereafter they shape us.

-Winston Churchill 

Resisting the Unravelling

It may be raining,
but there's a rainbow above you.

In Another's Eyes

Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, 
and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them,
above and beyond all thought, 
unless we were meant to be immortal. 

- Nathaniel Hawthorne 

Pleasures

One half of the world 
cannot understand 
the pleasures of the other. 

 - Jane Austen

Origins

Consider your origins:
you were not made to live as brutes, 
but to follow virtue and knowledge. 

- Dante Alighieri 

Little Things

Little things comfort us because little things distress us. 

- Blaise Pascal 

Wiser Today

A man should never be ashamed to own 

that he has been in the wrong, 

which is but saying in other words 

that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

-Alexander Pope 

Now To Think

And now I thought: 
till now I had only heard, seen, moved - 
followed up or down where I was lead or dragged - 
watched event rush on event,
 disclosure open beyond disclosure: 
but now, I thought. 

- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre 

Bravery in Increments

When you have mastered numbers, 
you will in fact no longer be reading numbers
any more than you read words when you read books. 
You will be reading meaning.

W.E.B. DuBois 

Les is More

Have a great day.

-Les Miles

Your Reward

And he writhed inside 

at what seemed the cruelty 

and unfairness of the demand. 

He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed 

your reward is usually to do 

another and harder and better one. 

- C.S. Lewis 

The Heroine's Couch

And now I may dismiss my heroine to the sleepless couch, 
which is the true heroine's portion - 
to a pillow strewd with thorns and wet with tears.  


- Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey 

Happy Now

If you want to be happy,
be.

-Leo Tolstoy 

In the Shadow of the Black Horse

The Lord's mercy often rides to the door of our heart 
upon the black horse of affliction.

- Charles Spurgeon

She Who Travels with Another (& Another)

The man who goes alone can start today;
but he who travels with another 
must wait till that other is ready.

- Henry David Thoreau 

Late Nights with Yeti and Nietzsche

When we are tired, 
we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Midnight Confessions

A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, 
when he kneels in the dust, 
and beats his breast, 
and tells all the sins of his life.  

- Oscar Wilde  

The Virtue of Displeasure

If you would attain to what you are not yet, 
you must always be displeased by what you are.
For where you are pleased with yourself, 
there you have remained.
Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.

-Saint Augustine   

Holes & Lumps

Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump.

-Auguste Rodin 

Eighty-Nine Years of Song

 Even in the mud and scum of things, 
something always, always sings. 

- Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Notes on Irrigation

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.
It enriches the necessary competencies
that daily life requires and provides;
and in this respect,
it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

- C.S. Lewis

If There Were Only Joy

We could never learn to be brave and patient, 
if there were only joy in the world.

-Helen Keller

A Word Before School

It is the mark of an educated mind 
to be able to entertain a thought 
without accepting it. 

-Aristotle 

The Problem with People

I felt for the tormented whirlwinds
Damned for their carnal sins
Committed when they let their passions rule their reason.

- Dante Alighieri

One More Time

The right time 

is any time 

that one is still so lucky as to have.

- Henry James

The Summer Straddle

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. 
I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar 

Redeeming Ruth

If you can't explain it to a six year old, 

you don't understand it yourself.

-Albert Einstein

Pretty Woman

It takes some effort to look like this.

-Truvy Jones

Simplify

Our life is frittered away by detail.  

Simplify, simplify.  

-Henry David Thoreau

Sex & the Sequel

If I don't write to empty my mind, 
I go mad. 

- Lord Byron 

Lessons from the Brits

Life is divided into three terms - 
that which was, which is, and which will be.  
Let us learn from the past 
to profit by the present, 
and from the present, 
to live better in the future. 

- William Wordsworth

Blue Skies & Rainbows

The Fly in the Salad

At Last

Until You

Life & Death on June One

Geography

Ode to Ethan

Prelude

Use Your Words

                                                     ". . . the law begins with language.  

Legal language must eschew uncertainty, 

and uncertainty thrives when language is gauzy.

- Justice Don Willett  

Climb Inside

School Days

The Tumult and Shouting

The Case for the Superlative

Slip Slidin' Away

Under Pressure

Girl Power

On Man and Machines

Time's Relentless Melt