David Abrams

Thanks!

Same.

“The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

#sundaysentence #books #reading #classicbooks #booksky

“They all had their losses, and if time made them easier to bear, the dead were also more remote and harder to recall, a silent slideshow of old memories unchanging as the past.” Stewart O’Nan, EVENSONG. #sundaysentence

They woke up to find the ground under them had dwindled to ice caps the size of a backyard, a bedstead, shrinking to the size of a coffin when the ice, getting smaller and smaller, turned to water and drifted unstoppably out to the rising sea.

Sleepers fall asleep on the ice after the 1698 Thames Frost Fair - from Daisy Hildyard's enthralling "Hunters in the Snow" for #SundaySentence

"Diamonds of saliva" for the #SundaySentence win!

“ To remember that the world was the world, and we merely passed through it: twenty-some thousand sunrises, each one with the power to renew us.”

From So Far Gone by Jess Walter
#Sundaysentence

Readers: what was the single-best sentence you read last week? Share with us at #SundaySentence!

Each week, I repost my favorites--like these....

The Month in Photos: July 2025 This was our month of Big Sculptures

For more photos from my unearthly travels through the Badlands, see my latest Van-ishing America post: davidabrams.substack.com/p/the-month-...

A near-perfectly rounded boulder sits at the base of a cliff. This is known as a Concretion Cannonball. The photo was taken in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.
—Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
#SundaySentence

Two women stand in a yard, smiling up at the orange sunset overhead.

Last month in photos: davidabrams.substack.com/p/the-month-...
Apparently, this was our month for Big Sculptures (yes, we found all the Thomas Dambo trolls). Other subjects: sunsets, spherical rocks, lakes, and dogs who deliver flowers).
Thanks to all those who subscribe to Van-ishing America!

But here was a softer, more introspective old man, seemingly humbled by life. An old, battered book, its pages faint and yellowed.

Jess Walter, So Far Gone
#sundaysentence

A photo of a somewhat creased paperback copy of Jim Butcher's second Codex Alera novel "Academ's Fury". Steve Stone's cover illustration depicts a dark-haired youth in Romanlike armor and scarlet cloak in the midst of a stone hall of reaching, grasping hands. Fire and smoke wreath the young man as he raises a long blade and recoils from the clutches of one of the hands.

#SundaySentence! What's a favorite sentence(s) you read this week?

'"You are different. That does not make you less."'

—the Count of Calderon, from Jim Butcher's "Academ's Fury" (Codex Alera, Book 2)

💙📚 #BookSky

A vintage photo shows a young girl, Helen Keller, seated in a chair while her adult teacher, Anne Sullivan, reclines on the ground next to her. Both women are dressed in white. Helen holds a doll in her lap.

At the beginning, I was only a little mass of possibilities.
~Helen Keller, “The Story of My Life”

#SundaySentence

#SundaySentence - Erika Dreifus The best sentence I've read during the past week.

"Nor did I tell her what I believed to be true: that Harold wasn’t capable of becoming accidentally lost, and that if he had died of lostness, it was because he had decided, in no uncertain terms, to lose himself." #SundaySentence via Nicole Krauss/ @theatlantic.com wp.me/p4x0h8-dsv

“Today there is nothing more I want than what I have.”

Michael Palin

#SundaySentence

"Passion, at its truest and most fierce, does not liaise with toothpaste" — Diana Evans

#SundaySentence

My #sundaysentence from NYT; jazz drummer Joe Farnsworth explains the musician concept of The Big Room: "A state of disciplined freedom where, once the music commences, all that stuff you learned, you throw out the window & now you're in a room where you can design it, you can do anything you want."

“When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.”

~Simon Ings, quoted by George Dyson, in ‘Turing’s Cathedral’

#SundaySentence

Anne Serre, A Leopard-Skin Hat: “It was strange, though: in Fanny’s case, the more she read, the more she seemed to fall apart.” #SundaySentence

A vintage photo showing a woman (Helen Keller) in a high-collared white shirt seated next to a tall man with a bushy mustache and twinkling eyes (Mark Twain).

I feel the twinkle of his eye in his handshake.
~Helen Keller on Mark Twain in “The Story of My Life”

That’s my #SundaySentence for this week—what was YOUR favorite sentence of the week?

#HelenKeller #MarkTwain

A grey cat, wearing a bright red harness and leash, stands on a sandy shore and looks out at Lake Michigan.

Happy #Caturday from this great cat touring the Great Lakes.

Waking up in Truth or Consequences with Donald J Trump It's a new day in America...

Waking Up in Truth or Consequences with Donald J Trump: davidabrams.substack.com/p/waking-up-...

New Substack post--and a name change, from The Quivering Pen to Van-ishing America. Thanks, as always, for reading!

#vanlife #travel

#SundaySentence #TodaysPoem #PoetryFoundation

Coffee was served: bitter and black, like chances missed.

A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel #sundaysentence #booksky #books ☕📚

“(W)ithout this $600 Pop-Tart of modern science, he had no way of reaching any other human being, and they had no way of reaching him.” An enviable suggestion of a #SundaySentence from Jess Walter’s So Far Gone. #BookSky 📚🏕️

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.
~Joyce Carol Oates
#sundaysentence

A brightly colored cover of Roughing It by Mark Twain, showing miners digging in a rocky landscape.

Our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle.
—Mark Twain, “Roughing It”

What was YOUR favorite sentence you read this past week? Share with us at #SundaySentence

The look that says “Do my bidding, or else.”

A grey cat stands on a table and gives his human a fist bump (paw pound?). It’s adorable and happens all the time in our vanlife close quarters.

Our month in photos, featuring #cats, cactus and clouds: davidabrams.substack.com/p/the-month-...

Happy #Caturday, everyone!