Our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.
—Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
Tag: essays
qotd: empathy
Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination . . . Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.
—Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams
qotd: open
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
—Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
qotd: chaos
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives . . . A schedule defends from chaos and whim.
—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
on david sedaris
Mini reviews of essay collections by David Sedaris: Calypso, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked, and Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls.
qotd: reading
Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.
—Susan Sontag, Where The Stress Falls
on call them by their true names
In her latest work, Rebecca Solnit examines a wide array of American crises through the lens of a single theme: the power of calling things by their true names.
