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Claudia C

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Claudia’s Notes & Highlights

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

2 notes & 6 highlights

Have you ever seen a hawk catch a bird in your back garden? I’ve not, but I know it’s happened. I’ve found evidence.

yes - happened in my back garden

The Silent Companions

by Laura Purcell

5 highlights

“Rest forever, tired heart.
The final illusion has perished.
The one we believed eternal is gone.
Just like that. Out the door desire
follows hope. Rest forever.
Enough throbbing. Nothing deserves your attention
nor is the earth worth a sigh.
Bitterness and boredom is life,
nothing else ever, and the world is mud.
Quiet now. Despair for the last time.
Fate gives us dying as a gift.
Now turn from the hills, the ugly hidden power
which rules for the common evil
and the infinite vanity of it all.”
― Giacomo Leopardi

59 likes

“I have a theory that too much learning unbalances the mind.”
― Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost

9 likes

“In the end, oh I know,
never, in my haggard passion,
have I ever been such a cadaver as now
as I take again in hand my tables of the present—
if reality's real, but after it's been
destroyed in the eternal and the moment by
the obsessive idea of a shining nothingness.”
― Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poems

7 likes

“Nothing remains but to hope the end will come to extinguish the unrelenting pain of waiting for it.”
― Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poems

18 likes

“The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.”
― Iain M. Banks

tags: fiction, fiction-writing, writing, writing-craft

249 likes

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Claudia’s Groups

Literary Darkness — 4801 members — last activity 3 hours, 33 min ago
This group is dedicated to an appreciation of important works of literature, both classic and contemporary... that happen to fall into the category of ...more

¡ POETRY ! — 22521 members — last activity May 24, 2026 04:09PM
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