This gave me a lot to think about and many areas for growth as a woman, a partner, and as a future mother. There are more post-its in it than I can count (and I'm not looking forward to typing up all the notes!). I began reading this for research on my OWN book, but finished it with so much more insight and amazing work to do for myself and others. A great read for any woman with a complicated mother-daughter relationship (or a history of one)!

This gave me a lot to think about and many areas for growth as a woman, a partner, and as a future mother. There are more post-its in it than I can count (and I'm not looking forward to typing up all the notes!). I began reading this for research on my OWN book, but finished it with so much more insight and amazing work to do for myself and others. A great read for any woman with a complicated mother-daughter relationship (or a history of one)!

This gave me a lot to think about and many areas for growth as a woman, a partner, and as a future mother. There are more post-its in it than I can count (and I'm not looking forward to typing up all the notes!). I began reading this for research on my OWN book, but finished it with so much more insight and amazing work to do for myself and others. A great read for any woman with a complicated mother-daughter relationship (or a history of one)!

Although it was sometimes repetitive, this book was extremely informative about all the stages of pregnancy, the options that are available to expectant mothers, every common question from conception through caring for a newborn, and all the changes to your body, your baby's body, and your life. A definite recommend for pregnant women or future mothers!

This book was fascinating, engrossing, informative, philosophical, hysterical, and so helpful for me as I begin to write my own narrative non-fiction! Read it as soon as you're able!

If you go to bed with dogs, you wake up with fleas, and if you hang around writers enough, you will be traduced.

I completely enjoyed Cox's tale of Cat Manship, though you don't have to love cats to love the book. The tales (tails?) of his six cats (woven through the main story of The Bear) are delineated in a loving and lovely manner, far exceeding a simple "pet book." Cox's craft with word choice and sentence structure is admirable as well, but the fact that he caused me to well up thinking of my own girl (and lost-to-divorce boy) made this an ace.

I‘ve always felt that a house without a cat is a house without soul.

I had thought that The Gunslinger would read more like matured Stephen King and his other books. It doesn't and at first I was disappointed. But once I began to take it for what it was, I enjoyed it thoroughly, though it does indeed read like a "young man's book." The remainder of the series will be an interesting ride indeed.

He fled the light and the knowledge the light implied, and so came back to himself. Even so do the rest of us; even so the best of us.

This book is the first thing that has made sense to me and my experiences with trauma and other mental illness since I was diagnosed with PTSD four years ago. It's part of the reason I feel compelled to write a book about C-PTSD and to make meeting Dr. Van Der Kolk a top priority. The medicine and science are accessible and fascinating, even to a former English major. This book is a gift. I'm so grateful to have found it.

He is too young to have learned to hate himself yet, but that seed is already there; given time, it will grow, and bear bitter fruit.

The silence held, spun itself out.

Sheb, drunk nearly to the point of senselessness, intoxicated and horny with his own continued existence, played with hectic, shuttlecock speed, fingers flying like looms.

The stars were as indifferent to this as they were to wars, crucifixions, resurrections. This also would pleased him.

The world eventually sends out a mean-ass Patrol Boy to slow your progress and show you who's boss. You reading this have undoubtedly met yours (or will); I met mine, and I'm sure he'll be back. He's got my address. He's a mean guy, a Bad Lieutenant, the sworn enemy of goofery, fuckery, pride, ambition, loud music, and all things nineteen.

The world eventually sends out a mean-ass Patrol Boy to slow your progress and show you who's boss. You reading this have undoubtedly met yours (or will); I met mine, and I'm sure he'll be back. He's got my address. He's a mean guy, a Bad Lieutenant, the sworn enemy of goofery, fuckery, pride, ambition, loud music, and all things nineteen.

Ye gods! what a glorious novel. If I could put it in the hands of every reader above a certain age, I would. It was gobbled in two days ravenously, and I will be after anything by Kate Atkinson now.

There was a giant thunderclap, a great cracking noise as the wall of hell suddenly split open and let all the demons out and then the tremendous suction and compression, as if her insides, her lungs, her heart and stomach, even her eyeballs were being sucked from her body. Salute the last and everlasting day. This is it, she thought. This is how I die.

All those unclaimed arms and legs lost in the fields of Flanders -- Ursula imagined them pushing roots down into the mud and shoots up to the sky and growing once more into men.

"Izzie is Izzie," Hugh said, which if you repeated it very quickly, as Teddy did later, sounded like a small swarm of wasps.

Snow like flakes of gray, soapy ash was falling outside the window. She thought of the Coles' relatives in Poland -- rising above Auschwitz like a volcanic cloud, circling the Earth and blotting out the sun.

The thick brocade curtains drawn tightly against the enemy, the night. The black bat.

The buzzing of a thousand bees in the tiny curled pearl of an ear.
Panic. The drowning girl, the falling bird.

This book feels like a good lecture or a marinade made by a talented cook. You don't so much read it as absorb it and its wisdom. I have learned from Gornick, and appreciate the lesson. The only downside is a feeling of lack of passion for creative nonfiction. Worthwhile nonetheless.

Within himself, the boy turned away to the glorious emptiness before him, to the birds and animals, the fossils and desert striations he found out on the sunbaked Nebraska plain. Here, in this silence, he did not feel alone.

Their presence was lonely-making.

I feel as if I have come to a great end, and I'm lucky it's late so I can fall asleep with it. This book -- this series -- was remarkable. I cannot believe I'm not in its world anymore, but I will revisit it, and often.

I'm was the dark flower of mankind, ordained since time's beginning to destroy a world that had no God to love it.

It‘s hard to review a book in a series without comparing it to the others. The Passage was a a marvelous introduction, & a middle book is but a bridge. But The Twelve is a glorious, fascinating, spell-binding bridge. The crossing was a joy.

A synchronous diaphragmatic flutter, or singultus, from the Latin singult, "the act of catching one's breath while sobbing." When Lila learned this in medical school, she'd thought: Wow. Just, wow.

A great twisting horror-glory of a book that fills you with both the greatness and terror that is mankind. There is love in these pages and fear and sadness and hope. It pulls you in and never lets go, not even at the very last page.

Grief was a place, Sara know, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours.

Amy, he thought as the stars began to fall everywhere and all around; and he tried to fill his mind with just her name, his daughter's name, to help him from his life.

He tipped his face upward, receiving them. The ashes were full of people, he knew. A raining ash of souls.

Our suffering is holy if we embrace it and look deeply into it. If we don't, it isn't holy at all. We just drown in the ocean of our own suffering.

This book represents eating disorders, PTSD, and the quest for perfection in such a deeply moving and insightful light. The illustrations are beautiful, and perfectly match the story. I was deeply moved and will continue to reflect on this book for a very long time.

And then I could see, this as soon as I began writing, that I needed to pull back--way back--from these people and these events to find the place where the story could draw a deep breath and take its own measure.

The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom--or rather the movement toward it--that counts.

A good precursor to Porcello's later books. It would make a great movie, or longer graphic novel. Length would do the the storyline well. But in and of itself, it's a resonant read that every post-grad reader will feel in their bones.

The best book I have read to date about experiencing mental illness, as the diagnosed and as a family member. It outlines all the major problems with the system that I have experienced, clearly and with strength. A must read, for all.

A lovely walk through the creative life, this is less of a "how-to" and more of a pick-me-up for wayward artistic souls. A beautiful piece of work filled with advice administered with an almost motherly tenderness.

If destiny didn‘t want me to be a writer, I figure, then it shouldn‘t have made me one.

Keep in mind that for most of history people just made things, and they didn't make such a big freaking deal out of it.

...creativity is a gift to the creator, not just a gift to the audience.