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Matthew Clarke

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Matthew’s all-time-favourites shelf

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Holy Bible, Douay Version by Anonymous

The Word on Fire Bible (Volume II) by Robert Barron

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Matthew is Currently Reading

Matthew Clarke is currently reading

War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

bookshelves: russophilia, 19th-century, books-recommended, classics, fiction, to-be-read-before-death, currently-reading

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(page 112 of 1273)
— Jan 19, 2026 12:21PM

Oct 01, 2025 12:10AM

Matthew Clarke is currently reading

The Holy Bible, Douay Version

by Anonymous

bookshelves: currently-reading, religion, christianity, ancient-literature, classics, all-time-favourites, to-be-read-before-death, sacred-theology-reading-list

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(page 614 of 1633)
— Feb 19, 2026 04:52AM

Mar 23, 2024 08:08AM

“My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it. It contains much that you will not be pleased to see: this I know and do not hide. But who is to rid it of these things? There is no one but you.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

tags: christianity, god, sanctification, sin, soul

9 likes

“I feel separated and cut off from the world around me, but occasionally I've felt that it was really a part of me, and I hope I'll have that feeling again, and that next time it won't go away. That's a dim, misty outline of the story that's told so often, of how man once lived in a golden age or a garden of Eden or the Hesperides ... how that world was lost, and how we some day may be able to get it back again. ... This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.”
― Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination

tags: golden-age, identity, lost-unity, unity-of-literature

4 likes

“Myself I must remake.”
― Yeats

134 likes

“Do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

27 likes

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman

tags: activism, service

3627 likes

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Goodreads Librarians Group — 320916 members — last activity 1 minute ago
Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more

Advanced Copies for Review & Book Giveaways — 16211 members — last activity 5 hours, 29 min ago
A place to help authors and reviewers come together to get the word out about new books as well as a group for anyone to post or enter listings for bo ...more

¡ POETRY ! — 22533 members — last activity Apr 13, 2026 03:25PM
No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read it!) Goodreads honors wordsmiths: poets and poetry promoted and prompted here. ~~~ "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." -- Carl Sandburg “God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.” —Anne Sexton On Clouds – “…what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about…” —Yevgeny Zamyatin “If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn’t wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.” —Donald Hall “Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.” —Boris Pasternak “Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.” —Charles Simic “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” —Gustave Flaubert “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” —Allen Ginsberg. ~~~~~ Amy King, Moderator Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the WNBA Award (Women’s National Book Association). Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is co-editing with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She is also co-editing the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. ...more