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Luke Jamison

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Luke Jamison is currently reading

The Count of Monte Cristo

by Alexandre Dumas

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Jun 15, 2024 01:59AM

Luke Jamison is currently reading

East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

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Jun 15, 2024 01:59AM

“When the clocks of midnight squander a generous time, I will go further than Ulysses’ oarsmen to the realm of dreams, inaccessible to human nature. From that underwater region, I rescue fragments that I do not begin to understand.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Conversations, Volume 1

2 likes

“And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.”
― Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories

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“All my romances, by some kind of collusion between their heroes, have invariably followed a prearranged pattern of mediocrity and tragedy, or more precisely, the tragic slant was imposed by their very mediocrity. I am ashamed to recall the way they started, and appalled by the nastiness of their denouements, while the middle part, the part that should have been the essence and core of this or that affair, has remained in my mind as a kind of listless shuffle seen through oozy water or sticky fog.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

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“There is no mysterious essence we can call a 'place'. Place is change. It is motion killed by the mind, and preserved in the amber of memory.”
― J. A. Baker, The Peregrine: The Hill of Summer & Diaries: the Complete Works of J. A. Baker

tags: sense-of-place

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“him. I also recall the great poster for Ana Christie with Greta Garbo, based on a Eugene O’Neill play. ‘Garbo Talks’ it said. In that film, a series of inns were shown to stimulate our expectations, then there was mist, then a horse in the mist, then finally a woman arrived from Sweden and walked across the stage. Ferrari. Was it Greta Garbo? Borges. Yes, she arrived at the bar and slowly strolled past a very long table. We all expected her to talk—we were waiting to hear Greta Garbo’s voice, her never-heard-before voice. What we did hear was a hoarse voice that said, ‘Give me a whisky.’ It made us shiver with emotion. That was her first talkie.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Conversations, Volume 1

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Existential Book Club — 1484 members — last activity Dec 21, 2025 02:39PM
This a book club for anybody interested in reading existentialist literature and fiction. Every month I'll be putting up a new text either by an exist ...more

The History Book Club — 25847 members — last activity 2 hours, 2 min ago
"Interested in history - then you have found the right group". The History Book Club is the largest history and nonfiction group on Goodread ...more

¡ POETRY ! — 22569 members — last activity Dec 24, 2025 01:37PM
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