Monthly Archives: May 2014

“We can’t chose what we want and what we don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth.”

At 771 pages, this is a long novel.  Is it worth it?  Many of the 57 commentators on the Kirkus review didn’t think so.  However, I love the way Tartt develops big themes.  And she has sentences that are works of … Continue reading

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“Don’t begin with an idea: begin with the point of the pen touching paper.”

Uniquely in America, there is “a desire to understand in the heat of living,” says Natalie Goldberg in her book about the practice of writing memoir. Don’t think of memoirs as records of events.  Instead, think of it as a chance to … Continue reading

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“I am a part of all that I have met.”

This passage from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses,”  based on the character in Homer’s Odyssey,  continues: “Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades forever and ever when I move. How dull it is to pause.” Indeed! How … Continue reading

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“I felt that this was my last moment to reach out and understand something of the world.”

Peter Taylor, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Penn Faulkner Award, is virtually unknown today. In a 1985 review, the New York Times said: “His narrative method is to hover over the action, to digress from it, to explore … Continue reading

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“Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows.”

The passage continues: “That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself.”  This book, the autobiography of Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, reminds me of Proust.  He describes … Continue reading

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