Category: writing

People thought it was silly, almost wrong to look at the end of a book. But if it spoilt a book, there was something wrong about the book. If it was finished and the interest gone when you know who married who, what was the good of reading it at all? Dorothy M. Richardson, Honeycomb.

Now that we are married, we will have the same dreams. Kelly Link, “Shoe and Marriage.”

In addition to being in love, we like each other and enjoy one another’s company. She’s easy to be with. Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

Intellectuals and artists concerned with faith tend to underestimate the radical, inviolable innocence it requires. We read and read, write long, elaborate essays and letters, engage in endlessly inflected philosophical debates. We talk of poetry as prayer, artistic discipline as a species of religious devotion, doubt as the purest form of faith. These ideas are […]

His mother sometimes looked our way as she came and went from the house. She didn’t reveal anything that we were mature enough to read—only kept on, often with a palm pressed to the small of her back. Nathan Englander, “How We Avenged the Blums.”

Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may find new forms. Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss.

In mid-March the sky over France was all exuberance. Ragged flotillas of cloud sailed before a brisk west wind. Sunlight sought out the gaps and flickered over the new-green fields far below, The sky was a place of awakening, of vigour, as full of life as the million seeds in the earth. Woolley hacked a […]

His fourth day in Africa was spent deep in the interior of a remote, unmapped equatorial latrine exploring the dark incontinent. Richard Dooling, White Man‘s Grave.

And yet only fanatics—in religion as well as politics—can find a meaning in someone else’s death. That’s what distinguishes them from mystics, or most of us, whose only concern is our own death. Elie Wiesel, The Judges.