Thursday

Feb. 15, 1996

From the Garden

by Anne Sexton

THURSDAY 2/15

Today's reading: "From the Garden" by Anne Sexton from THE COMPLETE POEMS OF ANNE SEXTON, published by Houghton Mifflin & Co.

Birthday of Italian mathematician, astronomer Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642.

American jeweler Charles Lewis Tiffany born in 1812.

Birthday of suffragist Susan B. Anthony in 1820; she was arrested and convicted in 1872 for attempting to vote.

The U.S. battle ship "Maine" exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898.

Birthday of composer Harold Arlen (Over the Rainbow) in 1905.

Cartoonist Matt Groening ("The Simpsons") born in 1954.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

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  • “Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories' shadows—and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough” —Joy Williams
  • “I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.” —Anne Tyler
  • “Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig” —Stephen Greenblatt
  • “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” —John Edgar Wideman
  • “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov
  • “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow
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  • “Let's face it, writing is hell.” —William Styron
  • “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” —Thomas Mann
  • “Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.” —Paul Rudnick
  • “Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.” —Padget Powell
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  • “Writing is my dharma.” —Raja Rao
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