Read through the most famous quotes by topic #lane
She [Mary Maclane] is almost always referred to as “confessional.” She has been referred to, several times, as the first blogger. Whereas her writing does not confess much - it is much more spiritual memoir than anything, or perhaps something akin to a mystic’s courtly love, directed at the self. I am wondering what distinguishes writing as confessional… I keep on feeling I prefer the latter-day MacLane, the diary she wrote while convalescing from scarlet fever back home in Butte, Montana, I, Mary MacLane, that Melville House is only publishing as an ebook. Mary MacLane melancholy, totally isolated. Feeling intense disquiet. Now in her early thirties, meditating on her whirlwind celebrity, in cities, feeling distanced from all that, but longing for it too. Obsessed with the Mary MacLane who stopped writing, or stopped publishing books, who was involved with the anarchist/bohemian crowd in Chicago, with the Dill Pickle, who died in poverty and obscurity on the South Side at the age of 48. I want to write about her, but I don’t know how or why yet. ↗
#mary-maclane #memoir #writing #age
At some point, one asks, "Toward what end is my life lived?" A great freedom comes from being able to answer that question. A sleeper can be decoyed out of bed by the sheer beauty of dawn on the open seas. Part of my job, as I see it, is to allow that to happen. Sleepers like me need at some point to rise and take their turn on morning watch for the sake of the planet, but also for their own sake, for the enrichment of their lives. From the deserts of Namibia to the razor-backed Himalayas, there are wonderful creatures that have roamed the Earth much longer than we, creatures that not only are worthy of our respect but could teach us about ourselves. ↗
His laws changed all of physics and astronomy. His laws made it possible to calculate the mass of the sun and planets. The way it's done is immensely beautiful. If you know the orbital period of any planet, say, Jupiter or the Earth and you know its distance to the Sun; you can calculate the mass of the Sun. Doesn't this sound like magic? We can carry this one step further - if you know the orbital period of one of Jupiter's bright moons, discovered by Galileo in 1609, and you know the distance between Jupiter and that moon, you can calculate the mass of Jupiter. Therefore, if you know the orbital period of the moon around the Earth (it's 27.32 days), and you know the mean distance between the Earth and the moon (it's about 200,039 miles), then you can calculate to a high degree of accuracy the mass of the Earth. … But Newton's laws reach far beyond our solar system. They dictate and explain the motion of stars, binary stars, star clusters, galaxies and even clusters of galaxies. And Newton's laws deserve credit for the 20th century discovery of what we call dark matter. His laws are beautiful. Breathtakingly simple and incredibly powerful at the same time. They explain so much and the range of phenomena they clarify is mind boggling. By bringing together the physics of motion, of interaction between objects and of planetary movements, Newton brought a new kind of order to astronomical measurements, showing how, what had been a jumble of confused observations made through the centuries were all interconnected. ↗
IN MY SO-CALLED CAREER, I'VE OFTEN WRITTEN THINGS THAT I VAINLY THOUGHT WERE INCREDIBLY GOOD AND THAT I ENJOYED READING SO MUCH I FIGURED EVERYBODY ELSE WOULD ENJOY THEM TOO, AND MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, I HAVE BEEN TOTALLY WRONG … I never stopped being surprised that so many critics were uninterested in them, or dismissive, or even hostile. often they tried to point out the allegorical failures of the pieces, even when they were clearly as non-allegorical as they could get. and more than a couple of times, I received emails from somebody asking me what happened, why didn't I write the stories I used to write, and why did I get into all this 'animal rights' nonsense? I guess they thought I was picketing outside university research facilities. I consider all my stories and novels to be animal stories … I never understood why people took MFA degrees, or creative writing courses, and I avoided taking them myself for many years … honestly, I can't imagine why anybody would want to go through the pain and agony of having his work critiqued in an open forum - I tell my creative writing students this all the time, they are all far braver than I am! ↗
The difficulty lay with the mind accommodating itself to the notion of the plane, with all its weight, defying gravity, staying aloft. She understood the aerodynamics of flight, could comprehend the laws of physics that made flight possible, but her heart, at the moment, would have none of it. Her heart knew the plane could fall out of the sky. ↗
So," the woman asks, digging through her purse and emerging with a pair of foam earplugs, "how did you two meet?" They exchange a quick glance. "Believe it or not," Oliver says, "it was in an airport." "Oh how wonderful!" she exclaims, looking positively delighted. "And how did it happen?" "Well" he begins, sitting up a bit taller, "I was being quite gallant, actually, and offered to help her with her suitcase. And then we started talking and one thing lead to another..." Hadley grins "And he's been carrying my suitcase ever since." "It's what an true gentlemen would do," Oliver says with an exaggerated modesty. "Especially the really gallant ones. ↗
I start reading every Elizabeth Wurtzel essay with optimism, like maybe finally she put her talent to writing about something than herself, and by the end of paragraph three that optimism has fled. So maybe you know Wurtzel has written an essay for New York Magazine? Probably you know, because for whatever reason, Wurtzel provokes a deep need in people to talk about how much they hate Wurtzel. So the comments are hundreds deep, Twitter is ablaze, and here I am, writing this blog post. And actually, she reminds me of Mary MacLane. She was a 19-year-old girl who wrote a memoir called I Await the Devil’s Coming in 1901 and it was an instant success. I wrote the introduction to the upcoming reissue, and there I talk about what a deeply interesting book it was. Not only “for its time,” but also it’s just kind of visceral and nasty and snarling, yet elegantly written. I kept thinking about MacLane, after the introduction got handed in and things went off to press. But this time, it wasn’t her writing that interested me, it was the way she never wrote anything very interesting ever again. She got stunted, somehow, winning all of that acclaim for being a young, sour thing. And I wondered if it was the fame that stunted her, because she spent the rest of her career spitting out copies of the memoir that made her famous. And it worked, until it didn’t. ↗
