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Michael Billips

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Michael is Currently Reading

Michael Billips is currently reading

Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

bookshelves: literary, next-to-read, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

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Jan 02, 2022 12:01PM

Michael Billips is currently reading

Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (Ishmael, #1)

by Daniel Quinn

bookshelves: currently-reading, favorites, literary

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Jan 28, 2021 01:02AM

Michael Billips is currently reading

The Eye of the World (The Wheel of Time, #1)

by Robert Jordan

bookshelves: fantasy, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in January 2021

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Jan 28, 2021 12:49AM

See all 5 books that Michael is reading…

“I prefer winter and fall, when you can feel the bone structure in the landscape---the lonliness of it---the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it---the whole story dosen't show.”
― Andrew Wyeth

98 likes

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

tags: evil, good, heart, religion

666 likes

“Being in the mood to write, like being in the mood to make love, is a luxury that isn't necessary in a long-term relationship. Just as the first caress can lead to a change of heart, the first sentence, however tentative and awkward, can lead to a desire to go just a little further.”
― Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation Into the Writing Life

tags: writing, writing-process

61 likes

“People change and forget to tell each other.”
― Lillian Hellman

2839 likes

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

158 likes

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Michael’s Groups

Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy — 8952 members — last activity 20 hours, 39 min ago
A place for those who walk the green forests of Middle Earth, cross the pale sands of Arrakis, sail the blue waters of Earthsea, slip among the shadow ...more

Columbus Creative Cooperative — 17 members — last activity Apr 24, 2014 05:56PM
Columbus Creative Cooperative is a resource for Ohio writers and an independent publisher of local literature. We spend a lot of time around books. ...more

¡ POETRY ! — 22502 members — last activity Aug 31, 2026 04:34PM
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

50 books to read before you die — 12116 members — last activity Aug 23, 2026 08:40PM
These are the named books: 1 The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien 2 1984 by George Orwell 3 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 4 The Gra ...more

Ancient & Medieval Historical Fiction — 6217 members — last activity Aug 14, 2026 04:48AM
The focus of this group is historical fiction set in Ancient and Medieval eras(with some post Medieval), in any geographical location. Preference is g ...more

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