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we who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting as a group to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift your analyst is in on it plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband and we have pledged to disappoint you as long as you need us in announcing our association we realize we hav..
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Phillip Lopate |
7381d48
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. -- Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library" --
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books
creating
library
writers
writing
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Phillip Lopate |
e5ac3ed
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The solution to entrapment in the narcissistic hothouse of self is to not relinquish autobiographical writing, but to expand the self by bringing one's curiosity to interface with more and more history and the present world.
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writing-advice
writing-craft
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Phillip Lopate |
20acb45
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What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph,
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Phillip Lopate |
6f72125
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For all their shared boundaries, the experiences of fiction and nonfiction are fundamentally different. In the traditional short story or novel, a fictive space is opened up that allows you the reader to disappear into the action, even to the point of forgetting you are reading. In the best nonfiction, it seems to me, you're always made aware that you are being engaged with a supple mind at work. The story line or plot in nonfiction consist..
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Phillip Lopate |
3464faa
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I have also time on my hands to correct my opinions, and polish my periods;
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Phillip Lopate |
f1b6897
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but the one I cannot, and the other I will not do.
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Phillip Lopate |
cbff0e8
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A young person still thinks it is possible-there is time enough-to become all things: athlete and aesthete, soldier and pacifist, anchorite and debauchee.
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Phillip Lopate |
33fd95e
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To be a writer is a monstrously arrogant act. It presumes that you should be listened to for pages on end... But there is much in the culture to clip the wings of arrogance, mute assertion, and encourage speedy consensus.
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Phillip Lopate |
8b885a6
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Maybe it's the fault of our language but dreams are innocent and pictorial. Then let our dreams speak for us side by side, leg over leg, an electroencephalographic kiss
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poetry
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Phillip Lopate |
b0e9635
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What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph, and thematic problem it has set for itself. The other element that keeps me reading nonfiction happily is an evolved, entertaining, elegant, or at least highly intentional literary style. The pressure of style should be brought to bear on every passage. "Consciousness plus s..
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Phillip Lopate |
74bc4c6
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The Japanese believe that sadness comes from an awareness of the fragility of life at the same time one is captivated by its transient beauty. The cherry blossoms. But that is a very superficial understanding of sadness, may I say. True sadness arises when we realize that the world around us is imperishable, and rather ugly.
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Phillip Lopate |
5572c90
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Part of the storytelling ability is simply the anticipation of boredom.
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Phillip Lopate |