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Marissa

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“Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.”
― Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

212 likes

“Nor did I reflect that some herbs, "though scentless when entire, yield fragrance when they're bruised.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

13 likes

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”
― Fran Lebowitz, The Fran Lebowitz Reader

tags: advice-for-daily-living, books, reader, reading, speaking, thinking, wisdom

7770 likes

“Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

461 likes

“We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.”
― John Marsden, The Dead of Night

tags: ignorance, nature

649 likes

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Marissa’s Groups

Around the World in 80 Books — 30716 members — last activity 3 hours, 44 min ago
Reading takes you places. Where in the world will your next book take you? If you love world literature, translated works, travel writing, or explorin ...more

BookerMarks — 52 members — last activity Aug 02, 2013 07:16AM
BookerMarks is a collaborative project designed to bring you full coverage of the Man Booker Prize longlist and shortlist nominees. This forum is inte ...more

Village Bookians — 256 members — last activity May 24, 2013 10:26AM
Started by a Village Books bookseller. Let's use this group as a place to discuss books we're loving or books we might not be loving, a place to meet ...more

Children's Books — 6888 members — last activity 3 hours, 24 min ago
From picture-books to juvenile fiction, award-winners to overlooked gems, the world of children's literature provides an endless supply of fabulous bo ...more

¡ POETRY ! — 22597 members — last activity Dec 19, 2025 04:08PM
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

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