One Great Moment

“Well I chased him through them county roads / Till a sign said Canadian border five miles from here / I pulled over to the side of the highway and watched his taillights disappear.”

—Bruce Springsteen, “Highway Patrolman," from the (brilliant) 1982 album "Nebraska."
July 12, 2017
Kari Howard

“The fact was it felt good to be angry, to yell and curse, because if she wasn’t angry then she was mostly afraid: of nightmares, of being alone, of the shadows in the church parking lot across the street, of cars backfiring, of the sound of knocking coming now at the door.”

—Eli Saslow, "A survivor’s life," The Washington Post, December 5, 2015.
June 28, 2017
Kari Howard

“We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered.”

—Tom Stoppard, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"
June 21, 2017
Kari Howard

“The great mistake is to live in Mexico and to be a journalist.”

—Javier Valdez Cárdenas, from his 2016 book, "Narcoperiodismo"
June 14, 2017
Kari Howard

“It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.”

—George Saunders, commencement speech at Syracuse University, 2013
June 7, 2017
Kari Howard

“He had gone into another room, to where the buffet was, after he had watched the 12 rounds when he was the heavyweight champeen of the world, back in that last indelible summer when America dared yet dream that it could run and hide from the world, when the handsomest boy loved the prettiest girl, when streetcars still clanged and fistfights were fun, and the smoke hung low when Maggie went off to Paradise.”

—Frank Deford, "The Boxer and The Blonde," Sports Illustrated, June 17, 1985
May 31, 2017
Kari Howard

“Did he kill? If he did kill, I would swear that it is with this meticulous, somewhat maniacal, admirably lucid care with which he classifies his notes, drafts his papers. Did he kill? Then it is while whistling a little tune, and wearing an apron for fear of stains.”

—Colette, "Voici Landru!" Le Matin, November 8, 1921
May 24, 2017
Kari Howard

“This will happen so fast that one night he will be in the backyard, believing it a perfect place, and by the next night he will have changed and the yard as he imagined it will be gone, and this era of his life will be behind him forever.”

—Susan Orlean, “The American Man, Age 10,” Esquire, December 1992
May 17, 2017
Kari Howard

“There’s no room for hate in ice cream,” Dennis liked to remind himself.

—David Wolman and Julian Smith, “The Cold War,” Epic magazine, 2015.
May 10, 2017
Kari Howard

“She was beautiful but when she tasted the water from the glass on her lectern she smiled sadly as if it were bitter for, in spite of her civil zeal, she had a taste for the melancholy – for the smell of orange rinds and wood smoke – that was extraordinary.”

—John Cheever, "The Wapshot Chronicle," 1957
May 4, 2017
Kari Howard