Just another writer
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Beautiful sentences
Your parents don’t get to tell your story. Your sisters don’t. When he’s old enough, even Pat doesn’t get to tell your story. I’m your husband and I don’t even get to tll it. So I don’t care how lovesick this director is, he doesn’t tell it. Even fucking Richard Burton doesn’t get to tell your story!…
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The Holy Spirit, the Pope and Homosexuality
There’s been a great deal of jubilation and consternation regarding Pope Francis’s conciliatory remarks about homosexuality on the plane from Brazil to Rome. “Who am I to judge?” “Gays should be fully integrated into society.” The conservatives were quick to argue that there is no change in church doctrine reflected in these remarks, and they…
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Beautiful sentences
She was Hamlet and his father and Shakespeare: she saw Milton’s snake and the miraculous flying horse of the Thief of Baghdad, but Saint Paul’s angels rested under suspicion of being made-up because she had been told they were special because true. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
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Beautiful sentences
Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. These are first-person memories—I Memories. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief—like the Much Ado wrap party at the old Playhouse in 1961, when you seduced Ron. Even recalling it is like…
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Beautiful sentences
A woman’s life runs from wedding to childbirth to nothing in a twinkling of an eye. A. S. Byatt,The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
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Beautiful sentences
Alvis stared into the drawing for a long time. He even thought about buying it, but he realized that if he hung it this way, upside down, people would just turn it over. This, he decided, was also the problem with the book he hoped to write. He could never write a standard war book;…
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Beautiful sentences
Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan…
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Residency day 9
And we’re pretty much done with the residency. A morning seminar with Jeff Parker on his place-based narrative project (I sent him my story earlier this week. It’s interesting to write something in the place where the story is located and that will be read in that same place. This was followed by a final…
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Beautiful sentences
Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who’s lining up to see a sequel to Truth? Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins