Saved by Anna B
On a Wonderful, Beautiful, Almost Failed Sentence By Virginia Woolf
By now you may be asking: what is a beautiful sentence? The answer is that beauty, in a sentence, is ultimately as difficult to quantify or describe as beauty in a painting or a human face. Perhaps a more accurate explanation might be something like Emily Dickinson’s well-known definition of poetry: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head we
... See moreFrancine Prose • Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Lost in a featureless wasteland of my own mortality, and finding no traction in the reams of scientific studies, intracellular molecular pathways, and endless curves of survival statistics, I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Mo
... See morePaul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
“I want to talk briefly about noticing, and how literature can make us better, or more serious, noticers. I will speak about three kinds of serious noticing—aesthetic noticing, human noticing, and metaphysical noticing. By aesthetic noticing, I mean the function that poetry and fiction have to help us see the world more closely and carefully—to see
... See moreEach word is a portable cathedral in which we clarify and sanctify our experience, a reliquary and a laboratory, holding the history of our search for meaning and the pliancy of the possible future, of there being richer and deeper dimensions of experience than those we name in our surface impressions. In the roots of words we find a portal to the ... See more
Maria Popova • The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name
On the one hand, language is a wonderful tool. It allows us to describe these other worlds in metaphors that help us think and imagine them. But there are many places where our language leaves us in the lurch. Like with vision, we don’t have a word for detecting light but not having a conscious experience of it.