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Philipp’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Philipp’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Philipp Winkler’s Followers (49)
856 books
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460 friends
4,984 books
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3,571 friends
1,289 books
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31 friends
4,627 books
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60 friends
1,548 books
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806 friends
3,609 books
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380 friends
4,132 books
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516 friends
14,362 books
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658 friends
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Philipp Winkler
Goodreads Author
Born
in Neustadt am Rübenberge, Germany
Website
Member Since
December 2011
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| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crazy Challenge C...: 2024-2025 Dare to DNF! | 590 | 99 | Aug 21, 2025 05:03PM |
“To put it another way: having gone about as high up Hemingway Mountain as I could go, having realized that even at my best I could only ever hope to be an acolyte up there, resolving never again to commit the sin of being imitative, I stumbled back down into the valley and came upon a little shit-hill labeled “Saunders Mountain.”
“Hmm,” I thought. “It’s so little. And it’s a shit-hill.”
Then again, that was my name on it.
This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too—it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.
What we have to do at that point, I think, is go over, sheepishly but boldly, and stand on our shit-hill, and hope it will grow.”
― A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
“Hmm,” I thought. “It’s so little. And it’s a shit-hill.”
Then again, that was my name on it.
This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too—it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.
What we have to do at that point, I think, is go over, sheepishly but boldly, and stand on our shit-hill, and hope it will grow.”
― A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
“No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.”
― A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
― A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
“We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate. Great art occurs—or doesn’t—in that instant. What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. But the “knowing” at such moments, though happening without language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.”
― A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
― A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
