This category keeps the quotes of much smarter others, and the sayings are usually about parenting.
Sometimes the the best ideas are the most simple! The best way for you to help your children avoid the germs that may make them sick this winter is to make sure they are frequently washing their hands with warm, soapy water.
From my son’s pediatrician’s newsletter
It is rather obvious why I chose this title. I believe it is what life is much of the time. When I think of great lovers in history, there was always some pain involved. Maybe not for everyone, but most likely.
I, also, think Love is beautiful and feels good. I think what some people do with it, who do not know what they are doing, is what makes it painful…sometimes.
So maybe it is not Love that hurts, maybe it’s the person we love. It can even be a lack of Love. Because Love itself is beautiful.
I named this book what I think about Life; Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime.
From J. California Cooper’s note in Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime.
From one of the most insightful essays I’ve read recently.
While it remains a human truth that people live in terms of images, it is also true that where there are no good images there will always be bad ones. And the images that, day after day, condition all of us are mostly drawn from the extreme, unmetaphorical range of the visual spectrum, evoking no recognition of moral complexity or depth. We have come to accept the mundane image, and its lack of human vitality, as only what should be expected, and are sometimes even bothered by the passionate, the perfected, the aspiration toward the ideal. The general culture has forged a kind of unconscious consensus with respect to the proper precincts in which beauty, and therefore truth and goodness, may be located. Given this reality, it seems to me that there should arise a challenge to this status quo from within those communities of writers whose job it is to expand the spectrum of acceptable images steeped in moral and metaphysical meanings. Opportunities for such expansions can come from the most unexpected of places.
From James A. McPherson’s “Workshopping Lucius Mummis,” (p. 306-307) in A Region Not Home
“I know I’m not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration — it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.”
–Philip Roth
It’s impossible to be balanced by either living in the past or by leaning too far into the future. The ground we stand on is right here.
My spiritual director, Lucy
I need you to read and soak something up. There is so much in these words worth reading over and over. I’m thinking about particular sisters, one of which is my beloved, when I read and re-post this.
Professor Tamura Lomax holds a mirror off of the academe’s bathroom and turns it to us, whether or not we’re in those hallowed halls. She’s offers it up for reflection and, necessarily, criticism. Her voice is sustained in the midst of the sweltering and exhausting enemies of her soul as a scholar and communicator of truth, talking and writing and doing her thing in her skin. She’s grants us a view behind an often unseen veil. Like good truth-tellers, she’s clear. And she makes me think about my own role in junk like this.
So, alphabetized, this reflection is for Aja, Blessing, Dawn, Ghana, and Michelle and for the academic contexts you’re currently in, considering stepping into, or pulling yourselves from. The rest of us will love you and befriend you and be strong for you. And we’ll use our strengths to be a revitalizing community for you that “loves you into” working and writing and thinking and doing your thing.
Read the full post here.
…I’ve been meaning to ask you a few questions.
Some would say memory brings life after death. Perhaps there’s truth in that, but only if we’re content to enjoy our recollections at soft distance, as passing flickers or occasional sparks. If we’re grasping and desperate, if we want it all too much, if we reach out and try to touch it, what happens then? It fades so fast from view that we’re left wondering if it was ever there at all. Perhaps the trick is to find a gentle use for memory. Learn to cup the small and glorious moments in our hands and treasure them, finding some solace this way. Otherwise, all they do is remind us that we are too late. That what is lost is lost forever.
From Emylia Hall’s The Book of Summers (pg. 323)
Some would say memory brings life after death. Perhaps there’s truth in that, but only if we’re content to enjoy our recollections at soft distance, as passing flickers or occasional sparks. If we’re grasping and desperate, if we want it all too much, if we reach out and try to touch it, what happens then? It fades so fast from view that we’re left wondering if it was ever there at all. Perhaps the trick is to find a gentle use for memory. Learn to cup the small and glorious moments in our hands and treasure them, finding some solace this way. Otherwise, all they do is remind us that we are too late. That what is lost is lost forever.
From Emylia Hall’s The Book of Summers (pg. 323)
If you’ll read between the lines, you’ll see how these rolling waves across my forehead are the flagship of motherhood; each wavy line dug in by the surprises brought by maternity. “How did you pee that far?” “Who poured honey on the dog?” “Why is the toaster in the dryer?” I know it’s not ok to scream “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!?!” twenty times a day, so my creased and wrinkled forehead says it for me. This raised eyebrow conveys a myriad of emotions, all useful in propelling boys toward manhood. I’m confident that of all the good reasons I’ve given them, this cocked brow will surely be the thing that sends my kids to therapy. …Yes. It’s that good.
This is part of Jamie Wright’s post, “Read between the lines,” which you can find here in full.
Isabel Wilkerson, whose book is wonderful for a hundred reasons, wrote about the price of writing The Warmth of Other Suns and a “cave of obligation” over at More. In celebration of the book being in paperback for a year, I’m giving away two copies. Leave a comment by Saturday, midnight, CST, and I’ll choose.
I awoke to the cooing of pigeons on the ledge outside my window and the sight of the slate rooftops of rue Racine, gray and streaking soot from the centuries. I could make out the murmur of traffic below, the coughs from the room across the hall, the fumbling for keys and the turning of doorknobs, the whispers and knocking of chambermaids and, in the distance, the aah-ee, aah-ee, aah-eeof an unmistakably foreign police siren. I was in Paris, the last refuge of the man who had inspired me and, in a literary sense, rescued me. I was in the hotel where he’d spent his first night here, waking to the same sky and sounds that he hoped would save him precisely 66 years ago. I’d followed him as far as the trail would lead me. I was in room 703 of the Hotel Trianon in search of the Paris of novelist Richard Wright.
Only a few years before, I’d been in a deep forest, seeking a way out. On leave from the best job I could imagine—Chicago bureau chief of theNew York Times, where I’d won a Pulitzer Prize—I had jumped into the unknown to begin writing a book, the first I’d ever attempted. It was ambitious; I wanted to tell the story of the Great Migration, from 1915 to 1970, when six million African Americans, my parents among them, fled the Jim Crow South like immigrants within their own land, changing our culture, our politics, our country. The project was taking longer than I had ever imagined. I was in year 12 or 13, having interviewed more than 1,200 people, narrowed them down to three flawed and aging protagonists and buried myself in their lives as I retraced their journeys from the rural South to the big cities of the North and West. One of the major events of the 20th century, this was a story so big, I couldn’t see the end of it.
In the middle of what was quite enough, the moorings of my own life shifted around me. I moved from the Midwest to the South, where the people I was writing about had come from. My beloved father, who had tried nudging me into the safety of an engineering career rather than the uncertainties of writing, who had reluctantly abided my decision and then saved everything I wrote (“Isabel’s story on page A14,” he noted in his draftsman’s pen at the top of a New York Timesfrom the ’90s), passed away and would not see the fruit of my hardest labor. With his death, I inherited the role of caregiver for my wheelchair-bound mother, who had always been the proudly and lovably more difficult of the two. And within a year, my marriage of 14 years ended. As for the book I’d signed to write, I was toiling away but not moving forward.
Then I came across these words in the endnotes of Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy:
I was leaving the South
To fling myself into the unknown. . . .
I was taking a part of the South
To transplant in alien soil,
To see if it could grow differently,
If it could drink of new and cool rains,
Bend in strange winds,
Respond to the warmth of other suns
And, perhaps, to bloom.
These words from Wright, author of Native Son, a classic of American literature, were buried in the appendix to his autobiography, as if waiting for an obsessive like me to discover them. In these lines (which are deleted in the current-day edition), Wright contemplated the moment he fled Mississippi for Chicago as part of the Great Migration. He would become the poet laureate of this turning point in American history, whose retelling had taken hold of my life.
By the time I read Wright’s words, I had worked on my book for so long that people began to doubt if I’d ever finish it. Once, they couldn’t stop asking if I’d found my subjects or completed the prologue; now they avoided any mention of it. If I brought it up, it was as if I were talking about an invisible friend. But I saw those words, and a thin sliver of daylight broke through the forest leaves and assured me that I could finish this thing. They gave what I’d been researching all these years a purpose, a breath, a name. I raced to finish it. Published two years later, it was called The Warmth of Other Suns.
Finish reading Ms. Wilkerson’s article by clicking here.
Are you sure this will be important to you in three years?
From Aimee Salter’s post about writing and commenting on blogs, over on Rachel Gardner’s blog. Doesn’t it fit so many occasions? I think so!
Michael Washington 