“If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in… you will interest other people.”
Rachel Carson – the marine biologist who catalyzed the environmental movement and wrote like a poet – on the loneliness of creative work
"Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason... On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make."
Happy birthday, Tolkien
"your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out."
Priceless: Tom Waits reads "The Laughing Heart" by Charles Bukowski, born on this day in 1920
“The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive.”
Advice on life and creative integrity from Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson
“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.”
Jack Kerouac on kindness and the self illusion – a beautiful letter to his first wife and lifelong friend:
“Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches,give alms to every one that asks…re-examine all you have been told…dismiss whatever insults your own soul…”
If you do one thing for yourself this
#NationalPoetryMonth
,read Whitman's Leaves of Grass
“Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions.”
Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on losing a friend:
“We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”
Thoreau, born 202 years ago today, on seeing vs. knowing and what it takes to really apprehend reality unblinded by our preconceptions
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Toni Morrison turns 87 today. When she became the first black woman to win a Nobel, she gave this remarkable acceptance speech on the power of language:
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
“Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, who would've been 89 today, on the sacredness of public libraries:
“There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”
Remembering Maya Angelou, who died 4 years ago today:
“Everything that is important and valuable and good belongs with the little piece of us which is not mechanical.”
Iris Murdoch, born 100 years ago today, on love and chance
"We love to contemplate blue—not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it."
A posy of blue from some of the most beautiful literature of the past 200 years: Goethe, Thoreau, Morrison, Solnit, Woolf, O'Keeffe, Nabokov, and more:
"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
On Dylan Thomas's birthday, the story behind his iconic poem and a rare recording of the poet himself reading it:
"Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk."
From poet Jane Kenyon, some mighty resolutions to live by:
“It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled.”
Oliver Sacks, born on this day in 1933, on the 3 essential elements of creativity:
“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience… Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.”
Ursula K. Le Guin on art, storytelling, and the power of language to transform and redeem
“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”
Bertrand Russell on how to grow old:
“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”
Long before the the social web, Susan Sontag, born on this day in 1933, presaged so much of today:
Susan Sontag had a radical and quite brilliant vision for reimagining education — no school between ages 12 and 16, then go back to school for those extra four years at 50
“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”
"Centre of equal daughters, equal sons...
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love..."
Walt Whitman reads his poem "America" — the only surviving recording of his voice:
“All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind.”
Happy birthday, Joseph Conrad