The act of reading ... begins on a flat surface, counter or page, and then gets stirred and chopped and blended until what we make, in the end, is a dish, or story, all our own.
— Adam Gopnik

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February 9, 2016

Favorite sentence ever in a biography



      And then there is a maddening gap in the record:  a biographer must retreat just at the point where a novelist would advance. ...
from The poets' daughters:  Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge, 
by Katie Waldegrave



Noted under: ,

5 comments:

Karen K. said...

Great quote! And I love the image -- do you know the name of it, or the artist?

February 9, 2016 at 9:20 PM
Audrey said...

Hi, Karen! I should have noted that. It's by a Danish artist named Carl Vilhelm Hilsoe (the scenes he paints are so lovely).

February 9, 2016 at 9:33 PM
Karen K. said...

Thanks, it's just beautiful. I'll have to research him.

February 9, 2016 at 9:40 PM
Cosy Books said...

There's a line in What Maisie Knew that keeps going around in my head about the band on a dress being 'glazed with antiquity'. Is it just me or is that really, really brilliant? Those few words certainly paint a scene, don't they.

February 10, 2016 at 1:55 PM
Audrey said...

Very brilliant! As hard as our Henry is to plow through he's so worth it. :)

February 10, 2016 at 4:02 PM

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