Discover new books on Goodreads

Meet your next favorite book

490 ratings (3.71 avg)
247 reviews

Gary Brecht

Add friend

https://www.goodreads.com/illuminater

Gary’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (2)
currently-reading‎ (1)

read‎ (489)
did-not-finish‎ (0)

red-november‎ (0)

Stats | More…

Gary is Currently Reading

Gary Brecht is currently reading

Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

by Brené Brown (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Gary Brecht said: " If you’re attempting to better understand your emotions Bene Brown does an excellent of differentiating and defining the feelings we all experience. "

Jun 18, 2023 12:09PM · see review

Gary’s Quotes

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
― Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology With Commentaries

tags: experience

810 likes

“Fatalism is born of the fear of failure, for we all believe that we carry success in our own hands, and we suspect that our hands are weak.”
― Joseph Conrad

12 likes

“It is better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one, than to have an opportunity and not be prepared.”
― Whitney M. Young Jr.

0 likes

“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.”
― Theodore Dreiser

tags: inadequacy-of-words, words, writing

136 likes

“If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make who would you call and what would you say?
And why are you waiting?”
― Stephen Levine

62 likes

More of Gary’s quotes…

¡ POETRY ! — 22508 members — last activity Jul 17, 2026 05:50PM
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

History: Actual, Fictional and Legendary — 1217 members — last activity Jun 13, 2026 08:53AM
This group is for anyone whose interest in History goes beyond textbooks. While I enjoy reading books that cover actual events and actual people, I al ...more

Books That Changed My Life — 372 members — last activity Apr 14, 2023 06:04AM
This is a group to discuss and list books that made a difference in your life, impacted the way you live, and so on. (The books don't need to be non ...more