Gleanings from My Readings

“From politics, it was an easy step to silence.”
--Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey

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From Newsweek’s feature “Women & Leadership: What Matters Most in My Work and My Life” (10/13/08 issue):

“People have to allow fear into the process. Fear is part of creativity, whatever your job is. It’s part of believing in something and wanting it to happen. So I let it in and I said to myself, ‘OK, you’re scared.’”
--Kimberly Pierce, Movie Director

“People hear so much advice, including a lot of bad advice about what they can or cannot do. . . If there are unwritten rules that don’t make sense to me, I challenge them and see if I can change them.”
--Nancy Andrews, Dean, Duke Medical School

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“The English have always gone everywhere, and written about it.”
--Larry McMurtry, in Books: A Memoir

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“I can’t imagine anything but music that could have brought about this alchemy. Maybe it’s because music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We’re walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn’t get to any other way.”
--Anne Lamott, in Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
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“The necessary thing is after all but this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going-into-oneself and for hours meeting no one—this one must be able to attain. To be solitary, the way one was solitary as a child, when the grownups went around involved with things that seemed important and big because they themselves looked so busy and because one comprehended nothing of their doings.”
--Ranier Maria Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet

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From Gary Soto’s poem “Saturday at the Canal”:

“I was hoping to be happy by seventeen.” (1)

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From Robley Wilson’s poem “I Wish in the City of Your Heart”:

“I wish in the city of your heart
you would let me be the street
where you walk when you are most
yourself.” (1-4)

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From William Matthews’ poem “The Wolf of Cubbio”:

“Art remembers
a few things by forgetting many.”

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Happy Reading!