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Sam is Currently Reading

Sam is currently reading

My Century

by Günter Grass

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in September 2018

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Sep 25, 2018 02:35AM

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Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

bookshelves: china, currently-reading

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Apr 04, 2026 12:59PM

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Collected Poems

by Chinua Achebe

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in July 2017

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Jul 23, 2017 09:50AM

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Sam’s Notes & Highlights

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

1 note & 28 highlights

(those long remembered can alone claim to be long forgotten),

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Sam’s Quotes

“Today I often said 'forest' to myself.
Truth itself wanders through the forests.”
― Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 11/23 to 12/14, 1974

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“They asked me my goal in life. I said, to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race and see if it could be mass-produced in plastic.”
― Woody Allen, Apropos of Nothing

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“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

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“Don't you find it odd," she continued, "that when you're a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you're older, somehow they act offended if you even try.”
― Ethan Hawke, The Hottest State

tags: adulthood, childhood, dreams, ethan-hawke, follow-your-dreams, growing-up, judgement

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A group in honour of the late Jim Ballard, who pulled science fiction out of the adolescent male ghetto and gave us books full of beauty, excitement, ...more

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Reading Peace is a book club exploring topics in mindfulness and Buddhism in daily life in a way that is accessible and relevant to today. We meet o ...more

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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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