Maureen O’Leary

“Love is visible—it paints the air between two people a different color, and everyone can see it.”

Alison Espach in The Wedding People

#SundaySentence

“A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you’re reading it.”

—Lily King in Heart the Lover

#sundaysentence

#SundaySentence (s)

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

Cat’s Eye
~Margaret Atwood

But it was too late and maybe it had been too late from the beginning. Everything beyond his sight mere abstraction— memory, history, perhaps even love—and the time for such things had ended.

THE ANIMALS by Christian Kiefer

#sundaysentence
#rereadingfortheholidays (which i invented just now)

This is a great one.

saaammmee so i go early in the morning before i know what I’m doing and only listen to certain podcasts i like if i am at the gym and this time of year truncate my workout to the bare minimum and also sometimes don’t go and do a home workout that hits the same muscles good luck this is a hard one

The result is that we largely end up going to writers of color to learn the specific, and go to white writers to feel the universal.

HOW TO READ NOW by Elaine Castillo

#sundaysentence

What better way to honor Omar and this book than to divest from your bank sponsors that invest in and profit from the destruction of Palestine? And to celebrate him by making a statement as such.

We belied our identities as wild and filled our lungs and bellies with poison, yes sir, we smoked anything
to try to see You, dear Father, as if we weren’t also skipping school, fighting barefisted, firing guns, dear Lord, but our crimes were necessary.

THE DEVIL IS A SOUTHPAW #sundaysentence

Your story is bonkers. Totally freaked me out. I bow to u.

Our Lady of the Grain is an amazing story within a truly fantastic anthology. Highly recommend.

The history of a nation is more than names and places, dates and events—it’s a flow of capital and blood over time, currents of euphoria and fear, victory and grief that bring a country to its present borders.

#SundaySentence

THE THIRD BANK OF THE RIVER @chris-arnold.bsky.social

"She knew she wasn't the same kind of bad mother that her own mother had been, but of course the menu of bad mothers is an endless and varied one."

Amber Sparks, Happy People Don't Live Here

#SundaySentence

"Nobody thinks of the present as the future past." Martyr! By Kaveh Akbar #SundaySentence

Sally forth! Not angels or mercenaries, Cherrise thought. We walk to work like kindergarteners holding a rope.

SACRAMENT by Susan Straight

#sundaysentence

girl same

Natalie Goldberg’s timeless instruction book, Writing Down the Bones

Struggling with creativity and focus, I come back to Natalie Goldberg’s foundation for my #SundaySentence :
“If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.” #Booksky ✍🏼📚

I found myself praying that the book will be taught more and more in California, where a quarter of the people living in the state were born outside America, and nearly half of all children have one parent who is an immigrant.
CALIFORNIA REWRITTEN by John Freeman #sundaysentence
@heydaybooks.com

Why John Freeman Still Believes in the Power of Story From family letters to poetry and journalism, John Freeman traces the origins of his writing life and the call to share extraordinary journeys through words.

From family letters to poetry and journalism, 𝘾𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙣𝙞𝙖 𝙍𝙚𝙬𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙣 author John Freeman traces the origins of his writing life and the call to share extraordinary journeys through words.

Love is always harder. Love means weathering blows for another’s sake and not counting them. Love is loss of self, loss of other, and faith in the death of loss.

BETWEEN TWO FIRES by Christopher Buehlman

#sundaysentence

No. Too sad. 🤣 I’m proud of the one coming up though.

How fortunate I am to be a reader while you are a writer.

“The three o’clock bell is big over the harbor, flakes of bronze dropping slow to the water, bell in her mouth, bell in her scabbard.”

~Leni Zumas, ‘Red Clocks’

#sundaysentence

“In those days you fell in and out of love with writers quicker than Byron did…”

Rabih Alameddine, The Wrong End of the Telescope

#sundaysentence

The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

“There is no doubt that creative work is itself done under a compulsion often indistinguishable from a purely clinical obsession.” — Ernest Becker #sundaysentence

MAX PERKINS Editor of Genius / A. Scott Berg NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY (1978).

“A writer’s best work, “ he said, “comes entirely from himself.”

Max Perkins

#SundaySentence

A paperback copy of HOPE IN THE DARK by Rebecca Solnit, with sunlight beaming across the black and white cover.

#Readers, what's the best sentence you read this week? Share at #SundaySentence!

Mine was an easy pick--but also hard since there were so many to choose from in HOPE IN THE DARK by @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social:

We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision.

Obsession is the only way I know how to relate to anything that moves me.

“Ulysses of Ladykind” from GOBLIN MODE by Caroline Hagood @carolinehagood.bsky.social

#SundaySentence

I also want to stop everything and read this right now, another NBA finalist.

I do have others but through tiny presses now defunct. 🤷‍♀️