I’ve been reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci. In Isaacson’s conclusion he writes that Leonardo’s “life offers a wealth of lessons.” He goes on to list and enumerate what these are. Check it out:

Be curious, relentlessly curious. Seek knowledge for its own sake. Retain a childlike sense of wonder. Observe. Start with […]

I first ran across the idea of a “spark bird” in the book Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation by Kyo Maclear. It’s a simple, and hopefully familiar idea. You see a bird that you think looks so amazing that you become a birdwatcher, a lover of nature. This is a common story, and question […]

I played some jokes by Demetri Martin, Mitch Hedberg, and Steven Wright today in a few of my English classes. Why? Well, to practice taking notes, and looking at what complete sentences look like, and to try to turn a few of them into sentence frames. Also, we discussed timing, delivery, and the subjectivity of […]

I like to capture sentences like Nabokov used to capture butterflies. There is a special joy in capturing a sentence floating out loud in the air that has never been written. People say fascinating things all the time, and they go unrecorded and forgotten. Until someone writes them down, or is listening closely enough to […]

If this was an assignment: WRITE A LIST OF YOUR 20 FAVORITE TEACHERS THAT YOU HAVE NEVER PHYSICALLY MET

This would be my answer (today anyway):

Jesus Paul Leonardo da Vinci William Stafford E.B. White C.S. Lewis Benjamin Franklin Neil Gaiman Nicholas Kristof Ira Glass George Saunders Jon Stewart Stephen Colbert Malcolm Gladwell John Green […]

Many times, like Leonardo da Vinci, I write things like “describe the tongue of a woodpecker” into a notebook. This particular command, about finding out more about the tongue of a woodpecker, can be found in Leonardo’s notebooks. I found the following five sentences about Leonardo da Vinci comforting, encouraging, and inspiring. They are all […]

In Frederick Buechner’s book Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC he defined predestination this way:

Predestination is the theory that since God knows everything else, he must also know whether each one of us is going to end up in heaven or in hell, and therefore the die is cast before we even cast it.

Theorizing […]

I don’t think joy can prance around with wild abandon without hints of despair hiding in the shadows. It’s another school year, and I can list many things to appreciate. Some are trivial, some profound, some odd, and some obvious. And they all live right next to each other like the sentences on this page. […]

Trying to figure out which Anne it was…Dillard, Lamott, Patchett, Frank? There are a lot of literary Annes. It was Dillard:

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later […]