Thornton Charles

95% reader, 5% writer. Makes valiant efforts in both endeavors. 💜💙🙋🏻‍♂️ he/him, will respect your pronouns

[Prof. Carl Sagan @ProfCarlSagan]

Are You a Socialist?

[𓐬 ✞ NoblePhares ✞ 𓐬 @NoblePhares]

@mattvanswol

[Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior]

We're near the ten-year anniversary of this interview, which was viewed as wildly controversial at the time. It led to hit pieces on me from liberal outlets like The New Republic as well as death threats. Now it's seen as conventional wisdom -- but it always was!

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is one of the most beloved paintings in America, and it puts its finger on something we all pass through, first as the child, and one day as the parent left behind...

The painting is Breaking Home Ties, by Norman Rockwell, on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1954. A father and his teenage son sit side by side on the running board of a battered farm truck, waiting at a railway stop. A single track runs along the bottom of the picture. A ticket pokes from the boy's pocket. His suitcase is stacked with schoolbooks and wears a "State U" pennant. The train is coming to carry him off to college, away from home, for the first time in his life.

Everything is in the way they sit.

The son sits upright, scrubbed and dressed in his best, eyes fixed on the horizon, on the track, on the future rushing toward him. He is already half gone. For him that train is the beginning of everything.

His father sits beside him in worn work clothes and scuffed boots, looking the other way, down the line, as if he cannot bear to watch it arrive. The same train means the opposite thing to him. For the son it is the start of a life. For the father it is the day the house grows quieter, the chair at the table sits empty, and the person he built his world around walks out into a life that no longer has him at its centre.

Look at his hands. He is holding two hats. His own battered one, and resting on top of it, his son's crisp new one, held carefully together, because it is the last small thing he can still do for the boy...

And then the dog, its head laid in the son's lap, gazing up, refusing to look away. Rockwell knew exactly what that was for: "The father couldn't show how he felt about the boy's leaving," he said. "The dog did."

It has moved people for 70 years because every leaving is a beginning for one person and an ending for another. The child steps out into the world, as they should. And someone stays behind, watching them go, and loving them enough to let them go anyway...

[Irish Literary Times @IrishLitTimes]

Jim Harrison - Easter Morning

[The Paris Review @parisreview]

“My father wasn’t insistent about me finishing college at the time. He knew that Hemingway and Faulkner didn’t go.” —Jim Harrison https://t.co/js0IHxUm9Y

[Victoria Chang @VChangPoet]

Opened to a random page. Jim Harrison’s The Essential Poems. “Break two eggs into a bowl/or break a bowl into two eggs.”

[Karen Piper @PiperK]

Trump is attacking the National Museum of African American History and Culture, so I just gave them a follow.

[Thornton Charles @ThorntonCharle7]

Solid point

[Neil Scott @MrNeilScott]

“Why not have the reader re-read a sentence now and then? It won't hurt him.”

Nabokov to his New Yorker editor.

[The Paris Review @parisreview]

“Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you’re seeking. The role is assigned to us and never removed. I think this is an unbelievable blessing. I mean, to be seventy-eight years old and still looking, looking—this amazes me.” —Louise Glück https://t.co/4qwiVYsT1w

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

[Thornton Charles @ThorntonCharle7]

Garrison Keillor's intro for Good Poems for Hard Times is as good as writing gets in our language. I can't speak for everything that's ever been written, but I've read a fair amount in the English tongue. If you enjoy reading it's worth finding. Bonus: great poetry collection too

[The Paris Review @parisreview]

“I’m gonna stay out here on the margin, and let the center look for me.” —Toni Morrison https://t.co/ijiay75C0D

[Thornton Charles @ThorntonCharle7]

Please help. This lady spent her life raising money for every good cause. Leukemia & Lymphoma, Children's cancer, Anti-Bullying, Palm Beach County Schools, Veterans Suicide, Toys for Tots, the list goes on... Now she needs our help

[Thornton Charles @ThorntonCharle7]

Please help. This lady spent her life raising money for every good cause. Leukemia & Lymphoma, Children's cancer, Anti-Bullying, Palm Beach County Schools, Veterans Suicide, Toys for Tots, the list goes on... Now she needs our help

[WPBCharlie @WPBCharlie]

My best friend in the world has become completely disabled due to autoimmune issues. It wrecked her physical and emotional health. She can't work and can't care for herself. Savings spent and medical bills are mounting. Please help if you can https://t.co/sNJjCqmcia

#MCAS

[Alina Stefanescu @aliner]

The fact is that all writers create their precursors.

- Jorge Luis Borges

[Skai. @superSaiyanSkai]

Learning begins where ego ends.

[Gabrielle Bates @GabrielleBates]

Frank Bidart

[Alicia E. Stallings @ae_stallings]

Read this thread. What a brave and noble man. He is a hero and a true patriot, protecting kids, educating the kids in his care about their rights: