One Great Moment

“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, from "A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays"
December 6, 2017
Kari Howard

“NOVEMBER, noun. The eleventh twelfth of a weariness.”

—Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary," 1911.
November 29, 2017
Kari Howard

“Before the aurora borealis appears, the sensitive needles of compasses all over the world are restless for hours, agitating on their pins in airplanes and ships, trembling in desk drawers, in attics, in boxes on shelves.”

—Annie Dillard, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"
November 15, 2017
Roy Peter Clark

“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”

—Mary Wollstonecraft, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," 1792.
November 8, 2017
Kari Howard

“Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.”

—Mark Twain, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
October 30, 2017
Kari Howard

“Along with these tots and second-honeymooners, there were Harvard freshmen … “

—John Updike, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," The New Yorker, October 22, 1960.
October 25, 2017
Kari Howard

“There was a kind of autumnal stain in the air that reminded me of the smell of leather work gloves, a high-school locker room at homecoming, the inside of an ancient canvas tent.”

—Michael Chabon, "Wonder Boys"
October 18, 2017
Kari Howard

“The private estate was far enough away from the explosion so that its bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were still alive …”

—John Hersey, "Hiroshima"
October 11, 2017
Roy Peter Clark

“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”

—Tennessee Williams, "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore"
October 4, 2017
Kari Howard

“Something in the world links faces and leaves and rivers and woods and wind together and makes them a string of medallions with all our faces on them, worn forever round our necks, kin.”

—William Goyen, "House of Breath," 1950
September 27, 2017
Julia Shipley