Dylan Tweney
@dylan20
Dylan Tweney
“Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.”—Milan Kundera, Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980.
Ruth Ozeki • A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel (ALA Notable Books for Adults)
We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more
Jake Orthwein • Why Frame Problems? — Frame Problems
The act of committing things to writing has been shown to be critical both in changing a person’s mind 7 and in making imagined stories feel more real. 8 Write in the present tense: “The speech is going well…” Or, even better, in the past tense: “The speech was a complete triumph…”
Olivia Fox Cabane • The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism
I used to have these elaborate theories that maybe there was something about the movement of the body and the water that magically sparked a deeper consciousness. But I’ve really come to realize the obvious thing, which is that these are simply the most unburdened spaces in my life, the moments in which I have the greatest uninterrupted intimacy wi... See more
Maria Popova • Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age
Winston Churchill knew this deeply. “The shorter words,” he says, “are usually the more ancient”. And “they appeal with greater force to simple understandings than words recently introduced from the Latin and the Greek”.
David Welch • English Is Made of Saxon Words and Latin Words. Here’s How to Use Them.
I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear.
Mahmoud Khalil • My Name is Mahmoud Khalil and I Am a Political Prisoner
Mahmoud Khalil, letter from ICE detention in Louisiana, 2025-03-18
Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand.
Tiago Forte • Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential
Narrative is a stratagem of mortality. It is a means, a way of living. It does not seek immortality; it does not seek to triumph over or escape from time (as lyric poetry does). It asserts, affirms, participates in directional time, time experienced, time as meaningful. If the human mind had a temporal spectrum, the nirvana of the physicist or the
... See moreUrsula K. Le Guin • Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
According to this Wall Street Journal veteran, the key to obit writing — or more expansive memoir, for that matter — can be summed up in three questions: What were you trying to do with your life? Why? And how did it work out?
Judith Newman • New Books on Writing - The New York Times
James Hagerty, author of the book Yours Truly: An Obituary Writer’s Guide to Telling Your Story