Martha Caroline

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Martha Caroline.

https://www.goodreads.com/mcpowell_

Girls to the Fron...
Rate this book
Clear rating

 
The Heaven & Eart...
Martha Caroline is currently reading
by James McBride (Goodreads Author)
bookshelves: currently-reading, audio
Rate this book
Clear rating

progress: 
 
  (15%)
Apr 10, 2026 01:10PM

 
Babel
Martha Caroline is currently reading
by R.F. Kuang (Goodreads Author)
bookshelves: currently-reading
Rate this book
Clear rating

progress: 
 
  (page 173 of 544)
"attempt number one million" Mar 27, 2026 09:23PM

 
See all 5 books that Martha Caroline is reading…
Loading...
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Ira Glass

Stephen Jay Gould
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

Hanya Yanagihara
“The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Always, absolutes, nevers: these are the words, as much as numbers, that make up the world of mathematics. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality––Dr. Li had once called it coy and twee, a fan dance of an axiom––but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. It was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.

But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself––his very life––has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes. The context may have changed: he may be in this apartment, and he may have a job that he enjoys and that pays him well, and he may have parents and friends he loves. He may be respected; in court, he may even be feared. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated.”
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

Peter Shaffer
“Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?”
Peter Shaffer, Amadeus

Czesław Miłosz
“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
Czeslaw Milosz

year in books
Natalia...
275 books | 11 friends

Lucy Dacus
1,345 books | 11,506 friends

poetic ...
240 books | 1,401 friends

grace
593 books | 48 friends

Alejandra
459 books | 78 friends

Cabot
299 books | 15 friends

Kayley
576 books | 850 friends

marta
850 books | 373 friends

More friends…

Favorite Genres



Polls voted on by Martha Caroline

Lists liked by Martha Caroline