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I was nervous to come out to L because I didn’t want to taint her memory of our friendship. I didn’t want her to know I’d been secretly in love with her. Especially if she hadn’t been secretly in love with me back.
“I composed balanced sentences and periodic sentences and practiced, till I was blue in the face, the English department adage, Vary your sentence structure. Amazingly enough, having a mix of long and short sentences, along with topic-body-conclusion paragraph structure, did not automatically make my prose interesting.”
― Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing
― Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing
“The enemy is conventional language; the antidote is poetry and mild intoxicants.”
― Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing
― Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing
“There is a moment following tragedy that some people never get to experience. You have to be ready for it or it will crush you to dust. It's like a window flung open and naked to the day. It's like being lifted away. It's like being stranded with everything you need. It's the moment you call a cornfield beautiful because you mean it, because you've never seen the world like this before, because newness no longer strikes terror but rather brings hope. You jerk awake into it like meeting yourself on a blind date. You surrender to that sudden first rush of joy without consequence, no more doom or fear or guilt, surrender to the sheer devastating presence of life, huge and indifferent, pushing into you like God's breath.”
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“When you’re not sure where you’re going or what’s really important to you, you’ll never know when enough is enough.”
― Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
― Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
“In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, "Do you think I could be a writer?" "'Well,' the writer said, 'do you like sentences?'" The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that "if he likes sentences he could begin," and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I like the smell of paint.'" The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabour it), is that you don't begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.”
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Silver Screen Book Club
— 421 members
— last activity Apr 21, 2026 06:46PM
For anyone interested in black and white movies, actors from the dawn of film through the 1960s, or the culture of the era, this is the book club for ...more
Angel’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Angel’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
3,082 books
|
32 friends
244 books
|
105 friends
838 books
|
143 friends
468 books
|
116 friends
57 books
|
20 friends
4,336 books
|
332 friends
572 books
|
68 friends
Favorite Genres
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