
“You get on this simple machine, you hold the handlebars, you press down on the pedals with your feet, and you go. That’s what you do, and to a boy of eight or nine, going is the thing, going is living. It is experience, art, observation. It is even religion, even if you are an atheist or think you are. As for myself, I have never had any impulse to confine myself to any such theory of disbelief. I am a believer, and my faith is enlarged by the awesome reality of the bicycle, and by the meaning of ownership and usage of the contraption, or marvel.”
William Saroyan
more infosource: foreword, The Noiseless Tenor: The Bicycle in Literature, ed. by James E. Starrs (New Jersey: Cornwall Books, 1982), 12.
medium: Nonfiction
“Chapter books were my salvation, in the same way as Jesus was for other kids. Our family was always broke, but my parents always shelled out our version of a monthly bar bill for Scholastic paperbacks. Thank you, Astrid Lindgren; when you gave us Pippi Longstocking, you gave me life. I read the book like I read the first issue of Ms. magazine ten years later. The experience was like Helen Keller breaking the code for the word ‘water.’ I wanted to race around spreading the good news. I could breathe again, forever. There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books were going to make it survivable.”
Anne Lamott
more infosource: “The Prayer of an Unconventional Family,” Opinionator, New York Times, November 17, 2012.
category: book, family, reading, religion, survival
medium: Essay
via: Beddy Piekiel“Writing about spiritual stuff for a secular audience is like doing card tricks on the radio.”
Mary Karr
more infosource: “The Art of Memoir No. 1,” The Paris Review, Winter 2009, No. 191.
category: magic, religion, secular, spiritual, translation, writing
medium: interview
notes: read transcript here
“I put my faith in therapy as others do in religion, or philosophy.”
Anaïs Nin
more infosource: The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 175.
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category: faith, psychology, religion, therapy
medium: letter
notes: Nin wrote these words in a letter to a reader in winter 1970–1971


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