PolyArchive

“I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo’s tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But […]

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”—American novelist and short-story writer Flannery O’Connor (1926-1964) in Wise Blood: A Novel (1952)

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”–Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men  

… Susan Sontag’s principal gifts to our civilization were not that easily packaged, but were a brilliant, non-stop commentary on contemporary art practices and their effects on our emotions. She did get off one sound bite in an interview on television, which was to me a stunning sermon in and of itself. She was asked […]

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. –Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking  

I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue. To me, the explanation of life […]

  “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.”  – Herbert Swope

“Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence. Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance. Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence. Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.” –Yoko Ono

Working in higher education, I deal with helicopter parents and lawnmower parents on a daily basis now. Overparenting is an incredible disservice to children and young adults. Not only do they experience setbacks, negative feedback, and garden-variety frustrations of life as insurmountable failures and barriers, they often lack the savvy to safeguard themselves from actual […]

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”— G.K. Chesterton, “On Running After One’s Hat.”

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order. –Samuel Taylor Coleridge So many people, many of whom enjoy other forms of the arts, are quick to declare, “I hate poetry.” I suspect that what […]

Here’s a little Web 1.0 curiosity that for some reason always manages to stick around in my text files. It’s macabre, and I haven’t verified the authenticity of any of them, but it’s interesting nonetheless. -N Thomas Jefferson–still survives… ~~ John Adams, US President, d. July 4, 1826 (Actually, Jefferson had died earlier that same […]

I had a long talk with Bruce Springsteen on a rooftop during the Vote for Change tour [in 2004]. And it boiled down to this: That guy you used to be, he’s still in the car. He’ll always be in the car. Just don’t let him drive. He might be shouting out directions. But whatever […]

“The buying of more books than one can perchance read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity, and this passion is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish.” — A. Edward Newton (1863-1940)