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Brenda

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Brenda is Currently Reading

Brenda is currently reading

Cousin Bette

by Honoré de Balzac

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Feb 25, 2026 06:07PM

Brenda’s Notes & Highlights

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

2 highlights

There is a period in the relations of children with any new grown-up in charge of them, the period between first acquaintance and the first reproof, which can only be compared to the primordial innocence of Eden. Once a reproof has been ...more

Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

1 highlight
Howards End

by E.M. Forster

6 highlights

See Brenda’s 4 books with notes and highlights…

Brenda’s Quotes

“Moth: I gave you my life.

Flame: I allowed you to kiss me.”
― Hazrat Inayat Khan

tags: fate, poetry, tragedy

57 likes

“He says, "I would walk around the township and I could point them out, which girls had been abused. You could see it in them. There's a luminosity to incest. The taboo is so strong and the damage so great. Luminosity--do you understand? It travels across oceans and down generations. They shine with it.”
― Emma Brockes, She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me

tags: abuse, incest, luminocity, sexual-abuse, shining, taboo

7 likes

“Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.”
― Matthew Quick, The Silver Linings Playbook

tags: endurance, feelings-of-weakness, happiness, life, literature, movie, sadness

760 likes

“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”
― Astrid Lindgren

tags: books, children, children-s-literature

3110 likes

“See how community is only a good thing when you're a part of it.”
― Sara Baume

tags: isolation, loneliness, longing, outcasts

6 likes

More of Brenda’s quotes…

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Brenda’s Groups

Graphic Novel Reading Group — 5405 members — last activity Mar 07, 2026 09:10PM
This is a place where lovers of the Sequential Art form of Literature (graphic novels, comic books, manga, etc.) can get together and talk about their ...more

The Life of a Book Addict — 12132 members — last activity Mar 07, 2026 10:39AM
We now read at "On the Same Page." ...more

Writers and Readers — 3107 members — last activity Mar 01, 2026 12:29AM
A group for writers and readers to meet and discuss books and the writing process. The group allows promotion of books, but please post in the designa ...more

¡ POETRY ! — 22550 members — last activity Mar 04, 2026 01:17PM
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

Goodreads Authors/Readers — 56201 members — last activity 1 hour, 50 min ago
This group is dedicated to connecting readers with Goodreads authors. It is divided by genres, and includes folders for writing resources, book websit ...more

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