Reads tagged with “diaries”

The Death of a Tree: Eulogy for Friend
“It is worse than boorish, it is criminal, to inflict an unnecessary injury on the tree that feeds or shadows us. Old trees are our parents, and our parents’ parents, perchance.”

Maria Mitchell and the Spider’s Web: A Touching Testament to Tenacity from America’s First Woman Astronomer
What a spider’s web and an infant’s hair have to do with celestial observation.

Perception and the Power of the Critical Imagination: Alfred Kazin on Embracing Contradiction and How the Sacredness of Human Attention Shapes Our Reality
“The day, the living day, the actual moment, the pang of real life, — to be faithful to this, one must always pay attention, one must never dismiss anything a priori as too trivial.”

Virginia Woolf on the Relationship Between Loneliness and Creativity
“If I could catch the feeling, I would; the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.”

How Leo Tolstoy Found His Purpose: The Beloved Author on Personal Growth and the Meaning of Human Existence
“That which one has set oneself to do, one should not relinquish on the grounds of absence of mind or distraction.”

Colette on Writing, the Blissful Obsessive-Compulsiveness of Creative Work, and Withstanding Naysayers
“A lack of money, if it be relative, and a lack of comfort can be endured if one is sustained by pride. But not the need to be astounded.”

How Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West Fell in Love
The real-life story behind “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”

Artist Anne Truitt on Love, Loss, Regret, What Makes Marriage Work, and the Syncopation of Grief and Gladness
In praise of “the lovely entire confidence that comes only from innumerable mutual confidences entrusted and examined… woven by four hands, now trembling, now intent, over and under into a pattern.”

Leo Tolstoy, Shortly Before His Death, on Love, Reason, Human Nature, and What Gives Meaning to Our Lives
“Reason and love define the demands of human nature… The demands of reason and love must not be subordinated to the demands of habit.”

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