Dinty W. Moore Quotes

We are rushing, always thinking of the future, of our destination, focusing on what is four hours, or four hundred miles, or four years ahead, and constantly missing what is right there, just then, at the moment.

Floyd Skloot's Revertigo is a beautifully-written, moving account of one man's off kilter life. Who would have imaged a memoir exploring months of extreme vertigo and decades of neurological turbulence would be filled with so much joy and optimism? This gentle, wise, and perceptive memoir never fails to surprise.

A lesson is learned. It is easier, more efficient, to chop onions when you are only chopping onions, not conversing, checking up on the rest of the kitchen, answering the phone, flirting with the young lady scouring the coffeepot, or whatever.

Not all writing is political or revolutionary, but the very act of giving yourself permission to write, to speak, to share the truth no matter whether the truth you understand is the truth others want to acknowledge, is brave, powerful, and important.

Those are serious questions. Let me avoid them as best I can.

Jim Grimsley's unflinching self-examination of his own boyhood racial prejudices during the era of school desegregation is one of the most compelling memoirs of recent years. Vivid, precise, and utterly honest, How I Shed My Skin is a time-machine of sorts, a reminder that our past is every bit as complex as our present, and that broad cultural changes are often intimate, personal, and idiosyncratic.

The idea that students don't know how to write clearly and precisely is as old as school itself, probably, but lately it seems as if students no longer know how to read either. It is true on my campus and from I can gather, on many other college campuses. The students understand words, sentences
they are not illiterate
but they don't seem to grasp the reasons for reading. They seem baffled when asked to take two thoughts, connect them, and form something new. They read James Baldwin or Henry David Thoreau and their primary reaction seems to be, "Okay, now I've ready that. I'm done." As if the only goal in reading was to have looked at every word.

The difference between a story and an essay is that the storyteller just wants to entertain the reader, while the essayist has been to graduate school.

Words will never fully capture what is alive in our hearts.
It would be a shame, though, if we denied our bears their dancing.

Kaethe Schwehn's poignant memoir explores longing, both spiritual and physical, community and faith, in prose that is calm, lovely, and filled with clear-eyed honesty and grace. Tailings is simply an exquisite book.

But if we don't prefer things, then we increase our chances to be content.

Exercise the muscles that compassionately open the heart.
In your writing and your life.