wordshaveteeth
a book bit me and i liked it
side blog | she/her | reading books and posting quotes
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Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.
- Pat Barker, Regeneration
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They talked for over an hour. Near the end, after they’d been sitting in silence for a while, Burns said quietly, ‘Do you know what Christ died of?’
Rivers looked surprised, but answered readily enough. ‘Suffocation. Ultimately the position makes it impossible to go on inflating the lungs. A terrible death.’
‘That’s what I find so horrifying. Somebody had to imagine that death. I mean, just in order to invent it as a method of execution. You know that thing in the Bible? “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth”? I used to wonder why pick on that? Why his imagination? But it’s absolutely right.’
- Pat Barker, Regeneration
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Rivers thought how misleading it was to say that the war had ‘matured’ these young men. It wasn’t true of his patients, and it certainly wasn’t true of Burns, in whom a prematurely aged man and a fossilized schoolboy seemed to exist side by side.
- Pat Barker, Regeneration
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Hens had a curious way of not thriving. They seemed to be subject to a truly phenomenal range of diseases and to take a perverse pleasure in working their way down the list.
- Pat Barker, Regeneration
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The vast majority of his patients had no record of any mental trouble. And as soon as you accepted that the man’s breakdown was a consequence of his war experience rather than of his own innate weakness, then inevitably the war became the issue.
- Pat Barker, Regeneration
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Rivers had often been touched by the way in which young men, some of them not yet twenty, spoke about feeling like fathers to their men. Though when you looked at what they did. Worrying about socks, boots, blisters, food, hot drinks. And that perpetually harried expression of theirs. Rivers had only ever seen that look in one other place: in the public wards of hospitals, on the faces of women who were bringing up large families on very low incomes, women who, in their early thirties, could easily be taken for fifty or more. It was the look of people who are totally responsible for lives they have no power to save.
- Pat Barker, Regeneration
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Fathers remain opaque to their sons, he thought, largely because the sons find it so hard to believe that there’s anything in the father worth seeing. Until he’s dead, and it’s too late.
- Pat Barker, Regeneration
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He didn’t know what to make of her, but then he was out of touch with women. They seemed to have changed so much during the war, to have expanded in all kinds of ways, whereas men over the same period had shrunk into a smaller and smaller space.
- Pat Barker, Regeneration
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Remembering the smell, his stomach rumbled. He’d had nothing to eat all evening, except a packet of peanuts. Crumbs of salt still clung to his lips, stinging the cracks where the skin had dried during his asthma attack. It was worth it, though, just to sit quietly, to listen to voices that didn’t stammer, to have his eye freed from the ache of khaki.
- Pat Barker, Regeneration
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Raindrops dripped from the trees, big, splashy, persistent drops, finding the warm place between his collar and his neck.
- Pat Barker, Regeneration
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A man like Sassoon would always be trouble, but he’d be a lot less trouble if he were ill.
- Pat Barker, Regeneration
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Why I picked this: Whenever I’m in a forced social situation, as an ice breaker I often say to people that I’m looking to broaden my book reading, and are there any books they’d recommend? This was one of those recommendations. A work colleague said his wife loves this author and in particular, this series, so I’m giving it a go. [side note: why do people recommend such massively long books?]
#books#pat barker#the regeneration trilogy#booklr#books and reading#reading list 2024#reading#reading list#booker prize winner
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Careful writers and discerning readers delight in the profusion of words in the English lexicon, no two of which are exact synonyms. Many words convey subtle shades of meaning, provide glimpses into the history of the language, conform to elegant principles of assembly, or enliven prose with distinctive imagery, sound, and rhythm. Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading. Their readers’ reward consists of partaking in it—and, if they themselves write, helping to preserve—this rich patrimony.
- Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
#quote#steven pinker#the sense of style#writing#writeblr#writing advice#writing tips#writing quotes#writing resources
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There is a big difference between a coherent passage of writing and a flaunting of one’s erudition, a running journal of one’s thoughts, or a published version of one’s notes. A coherent text is a designed object: an ordered tree of sections within sections, crisscrossed by arcs that track topics, points, actors, and themes, and held together by connectors that tie one proposition to the next. Like other designed objects, it comes about not by accident but by drafting a blueprint, attending to details, and maintains a sense of harmony and balance.
- Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
#quote#steven pinker#the sense of style#writing#writeblr#writing advice#writing tips#writing quotes#writing resources
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Figuring out the right level of explicitness for coherence relations is a major reason that a writer needs to think hard about the state of knowledge of her readers and show a few of them a draft to see whether she got it right. It’s an aspect of the art of writing which depends on intuition, experience, and guesswork, but there is also an overarching guideline. Humans are cursed with attributing too much of their own knowledge to others, which means that overall there is a greater danger of prose being confusing because it has too few connectives than pedantic because it has too many. When in doubt, connect.
- Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
#quote#steven pinker#the sense of style#writing#writeblr#writing resources#writing advice#writing reference#writing quotes#writing tips
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All things being equal, it’s good for a writer to work with the ongoing newsreel in readers’ minds and describe events in chronological order: She showered before she ate is easier to understand than She ate after she showered. For the same reason, After she showered, she ate is easier than Before she ate, she showered.
- Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
#quote#writing quotes#writing#writeblr#writing resources#writing tips#writing advice#steven pinker#the sense of style#I love what reading these sentences does to my brain#the observation is spot on for me
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So which guideline should a writer follow, “Avoid elegant variation” or “Don’t use a word twice on one page”? Traditional style guides don’t resolve the contradiction, but psycholinguistics can help. Wording should not be varied capriciously, because in general people assume that if someone uses two different words they’re referring to two different things. And… wording should never be varied when a writer is comparing or contrasting two things. But wording should be varied when an entity is referred to multiple times in quick succession and repeating the name would sound monotonous or would misleadingly suggest that a new actor had entered the scene.
- Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
#quote#steven pinker#the sense of style#writing quotes#writing#writeblr#writing advice#writing tips#writing resources#writing reference
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