“One step at a time, one day at a time, just today, just this day to get through.”
― A Long Walk to Water
― A Long Walk to Water
“I am convinced that poets are toddlers in a cathedral, slobbering on wooden blocks and piling them up in the light of the stained glass. We can hardly make anything beautiful that wasn’t beautiful in the first place. We aren’t writers, but gleeful rearrangers of words whose meanings we can’t begin to know. When we manage to make something pretty, it’s only so because we are ourselves a flourish on a greater canvas. That means there’s no end to the discovery. We may crawl around the cathedral floor for ages before we grow up enough to reach the doorknob and walk outside into a garden of delights. Beyond that, the city, then the rolling hills, then the sea. And when the world of every cell has been limned and painted and sung, we lie back on the grass, satisfied that our work is done. Then, of course, the sun sets and we see above us the dark dome of glittering stars.
On and on it goes, all the way to the lightless borderlands of time and space, which we come to discover in some future age are but the beginnings or endings of a single word spoken from the mouth of God. Some nights, while I traipse down the hill, I imagine that word isn’t a word at all, but a burst of laughter.”
―
On and on it goes, all the way to the lightless borderlands of time and space, which we come to discover in some future age are but the beginnings or endings of a single word spoken from the mouth of God. Some nights, while I traipse down the hill, I imagine that word isn’t a word at all, but a burst of laughter.”
―
“Reading for writers is like training for athletes.”
― A Long Walk to Water
― A Long Walk to Water
“If he were older and stronger, would he have given water to those men? Or would he, like most of the group, have kept his water for himself?”
― A Long Walk to Water: Based on a True Story
― A Long Walk to Water: Based on a True Story
“More than twelve hundred boys arrived safely. It took them a year and a half.”
― A Long Walk to Water: Based on a True Story
― A Long Walk to Water: Based on a True Story
Gpaulding’s 2025 Year in Books
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