Just another writer

  • Beautiful sentences

    There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles. Ann Patchett, State of Wonder.

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  • Recommendations are hard

    In today’s e-mail. I’ve chosen not to identify the online bookstore behind these recommendations. They’ve suffered enough.

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  • Beauiful sentences

    I found the notion of a religion designed to humble the proud thrilling. I also loved the Quran’s habit of the question—“Do you not understand?” (2:44); “Have you not seen?” (31:20)—despite the fact, because of the fact, that these questions were rarely answered. Stephen Prothero, God is not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World.

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  • Beautiful sentences

    Never losing the drive to get them ready for the cold hard world that they will someday attempt to join and that will, in the end reject them. Kris D’Agostino, The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac.

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  • “An Abduction” by Tessa Hadley

    Some months ago, I stashed away a link to An Abduction in Instapaper and finally got to reading it last week. I was drawn into the story immediately. Hadley writes in a wonderful voice, giving the opening almost the feel of non-fiction: Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed. This happened…

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  • Beautiful sentences

    He had read somewhere once that different kinds of smiles came from different parts of the brain, that a genuine smile, a smile of real pleasure, came from one site, and a polite smile, a smile only intended to signal pleasure, came from another. This smile came from there, that other part. Susan Miller, The Lake Shore Limited.

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  • Why Christians should support equal rights for gays and lesbians

    The key justification for the widespread anti-gay stance of many Christians today is scriptural. It’s hard to get past the scriptural prohibitions on homosexuality, even if we were to discard the Old Testament texts as having been superseded by the new covenant, there are still the passages in the Pauline epistles. So given this, then…

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  • Beautiful sentences

    Barnes & Noble is a burning testament to man’s desire to do his shopping in large, pulsing chain stores. Kris D’Agostino, The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac.

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  • Divagate

    I’m always conscious of the words that appear in the books I read, looking for those words which I don’t know. I’ve had the word “divagate” in my list of interesting words for a while, long enough that I forget where it came from. I found two definitions for the word. A literal meaning of…

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