Readings

Books To Consider:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The Dharma Bums

Jack Kerouac

The Color Purple

Alice Walker

Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke

Just Kids

Patti Smith

The War of Art

Steven Pressfield

The Geography of Bliss

Eric Weiner

The Giving Tree

Shel Silverstein

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls

Autobiography of a Face

Lucy Grealy

Keith Haring Journals

Keith Haring

A Place to Stand

Jimmy Santiago Baca

"I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted."-Jack Kerouac

"Nothing is everything, but everything is something."

-Beth Ames Swartz

"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"-Milan Kundera

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.”

-Buddha

“We love because it's the only true adventure.”

-Nikki Giovanni

"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."-John Lennon

“Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.”

-Naomi Shihab Nye