2,346 books
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5,141 voters
“Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable—like I'm about to cry any second—and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.”
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“...joy was something she willed herself to show us, something she raised from deep inside herself as a promise for what could be. Now her life seemed to have opened up into it as if it had been waiting for her. (215)”
― Townie
― Townie
“One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.”
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“One of the things I tell the writers with whom I work is, man, when you finish a draft of a poem, or short story or novel, you make sure you go out and celebrate all night long because whether the world ever notices or not, whether you get it published or not, you did something most people never do: You started, stuck with, and finished a creative work. And that is a triumph. That is something to celebrate. All the stuff that I'm talking about is really from the point of view of trying to create art—and I don't mean to sound highfalutin when I bring the word "art" in. All I mean is, a work that seeks to illuminate truth in whatever way possible.”
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“And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.”
― Townie
― Townie
Emmanuelle’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Emmanuelle’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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