#essays

For myself, working between two languages as far apart as English and Chinese, I cannot help but feel my visibility when I

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Nor do the poems [of Jane Kenyon] ever culminate in that tiresome ‘Now I see’ of transfigured experience. If the dog and

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But I think of them when people tell me I write “too beautifully.” You can’t really choose your style, or your music, or

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Others disapproved of him because he devoted his whole life to art, and they saw he was not a genius. For them, the nobility

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Of all trees, birches are perhaps the most like grass. They are small, pliant, slender; and if they promise a kind

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We do not live in the first chapter of Genesis. We live – if one follows the biblical sequence of events – after the Fall.

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Paradoxically, [Blue] is the only one of all the colors which can be legitimately seen as a close neighbor to, as well

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Love bestows innocence. It has nothing to forgive. The person loved is not the same as the person seen crossing the street

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The human imagination, however, has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice

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In every work of genius we recognize our own thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

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The capacity to fall in love is now thought of as natural and universal — and as a passive capacity. (Love

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He saw his life refracted through the prism of other people’s words. It was another way of not being noticed. Of

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At first we let the story carry us along and we think we recognise it, and for a while we even feel at home and walk

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Certain moments of my life I’ve lived twice: first, seeing them, and later on, writing them. Without a doubt I have lived

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As I see it…places don’t exist. A place is just my idea of it.

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“I have come to mistrust a particular sort of novel: the sort that attempts to tell the whole story of a human life or ...