David Abrams

What have I been up to in the last six months? Starting a fresh new chapter of Art in my life by taking up #watercolor #painting. Here are some examples of the dozens of canvases I've completed since I started in January.

"I always want to know the things one shouldn't do." "So as to do them?" asked her aunt. "So as to choose," said Isabel. -- Henry James, Portrait of a Lady #SundaySentence

"Sometimes it was clear and bluebird-bright, and sometimes snow fell all around them and the world was wrapped in silence, and then the winter sun would break through the trees and the light -- apricot, aquamarine -- would appear against the horizon." COUNTRY PEOPLE Daniel Mason #SundaySentence

"I choose to hold you in my dreams… For in my dreams, you have no end.” ― Rumi #sundaysentence 📚 💙

Because fiction is where memory and imagination meet #sundaysentence #beginningmiddleend #valerialuiselli @aaknopf.bsky.social

Today’s #SundaySentence is from the entertaining restaurant farce The Reservation, by Rebecca Kauffman. Like all good bartenders, Darius had mastered the two most important aspects of his job: pretending he was listening when he was not listening, and pretending he was not listening when he was.

#SundaySentence (s) She is both history and now. Her unhappiness travels through time, feels palpable yet is enigmatic, beyond comfort or rescue because she is paint on a wall. "Report" essay, The Missouri Review ~ Michael Downs @michaeldowns.bsky.social

This was a fun read by @carolinebicks.bsky.social for those of us who soaked in cocaine-era King at a ridiculously young age & then went on to be writers ourselves. (Turns out, that's a pretty big cohort.) My #sundaysentence this week is my favorite King line: "Sometimes, Louis, dead is better."

“It was like walking through a folk song that afternoon — the blackbirds and the thrushes, the sweetness of the flowers, the boy I loved, and who might even love me, waiting for me between the trees.” Seán Hewitt - Open, Heaven #SundaySentence #FolkloreSunday #QueerBooks

"I'd be aghast at my own audacity if I didn't think that someone needed to try to connect these dots across space, time, and topics, and that it's better to do it imperfectly then not to do it at all." - Rebecca Solnit, The Beginning Comes After the End (2026) #SundaySentence

There was nothing wrong with Roger, but talking to him was laborious. ~Thomas McGuane, "Balloons" (in A WOODED SHORE) #SundaySentence I've been away from BlueSky for awhile. Missed the Sunday Sentence community. Thought I'd pop back in. I mean, how could I not post this superb McGuane sentence?

The snow beat in a soft flurry against the windowpanes. It made a whispery, uneasy sound. ~"Three Blind Mice," Agatha Christie #SundaySentence

One doesn't recognise in one's life the really important moments—not until it's too late. "Endless Night," Agatha Christie My #SundaySentence comes from my annual "Christie-mas" read. What was YOUR favorite sentence of the week? Share with us, using the hashtag!

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." #SundaySentence #JamesJoyce #TheDead

Oh, my brother, we’re lighting the torches and heading out into the darkness to find the words and bring them back to you. #sundaysentence #lateinvocationformagic #jimdaniels #msupress #netgalley

...if the place is legitimate there is no pool, there is no second floor, just leather against flesh, flesh against bone, rope slapping concrete, slapping earth, that machine gun fire of sideways fists against speed bag. #sundaysentence Lucas Schaefer, The Slip

My #sundaysentence this week performs a delightful left turn, courtesy the great @danchaon.bsky.social: “She kept her face stern and neutral, the kind of face you made when you chopped the head off of a chicken.” Honestly, what a terrific novel this is.

A #SundaySentence from John Cheever's story, "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill."

#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

I loved “Seven Stories About Tammy” by @elizmccrack.bsky.social so much, I couldn’t pick just one #SundaySentence so here are two: Tammy's breath was as soft and insubstantial as health food. They'd given her a glass of white wine that tasted green as a tree, with an aftertaste of violin.

The land wears her corset of cement. My #SundaySentence comes from “Ruin Song (Number 8)” from SWEET HUSK by Corrie Williamson Readers, what was YOUR favorite sentence of the week? Join the weekly celebration of language and literature at the hashtag!

The fact is, Mr. Dickens writes too often and too fast….If he persists much longer in this course, it requires no gift of prophecy to foretell his fate—he has risen like a rocket, and he will come down like the stick. —Abraham Hayward on Charles Dickens in The Quarterly Review, 1837 #SundaySentence

What if I told you the most beautiful novel I read this year was about a mass shooting at a school? Read the full review of BLOOMLAND by John Englehardt at Van-ishing America: davidabrams.substack.com/p/what-im-re... #FridayReads #bookreview #bestbooks

The latest installment in "The Month in Photos" at Van-ishing America features Kindle the #cat, #witches, #zombies and the #Halloween residents of #EurekaSprings, #Arkansas (along with a sidetrip to #Montana to pick up our household goods). See the pics here: davidabrams.substack.com/p/the-month-...

I think being a teenager is about hiding all your quirks and contorting yourself to fit in and impress people, and being an adult is about re-finding who you were when you were eight years old. #SundaySentence We Could Be Rats by Emily Austin

This is, in a nutshell, the whole raison d’etre of #SundaySentence

By early Sunday morning, the City, so far from settling itself for a deeper sleep, lies silently expectant, awaiting the visitation of a ghostly army, summoned by bells to worship old gods in their carefully preserved shrines and to walk down quiet, remembered streets. P D James #SundaySentence

“We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.” Tennessee Williams #SundaySentence

theresakishkan.com/2025/10/22/r... a #SundaySentence from Theresa Kishkan's redux: morning (parenthesis) ... This morning, at the beginning of my swim, a little silver trout jumped out of the water just beyond where I was heading, the curve of its body an opening parenthesis to my thinking.

It’s Sunday: Do you know where your sentence is? Each week, #readers share the very best sentence(s) they read in the past week. Share your favorite at #SundaySentence

My #SundaySentence is from the remarkable, unforgettable BLOOMLAND by John Englehardt: Other than telling her your name is Eddie, you won't remember what exactly you say. But you will remember how unique this moment feels, like two swimmers from separate shores meeting in the open water.

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 ✍🏼📚

#SundaySentence from About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler, Jordan Stump (Translator)

“And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.” A #SundaySentence by Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“The continuous cycle of pronominal expansion and contraction is the heart of writing for me, it is the time of writing, the filling and emptying of the chambers of the art.” —— Ben Lerner, Cardiography #SundaySentence

#sundaysentence "I kissed your birthmarks little islands on your skin; new, discovered lands." - Caroline Kaufman, Light Filters In

Here's a #SundaySentence (or two) from These Truths by Jill Lepore

“Whenever he walked up the creaking mast of stairs to their seagull’s nest apartment, he was surprised anew by Ulla’s elfin beauty, by the pine floors, by the white Ikea couch, by the Western lightness and comfort that was, apparently, his. —Kiran Desai #SundaySentence

Despite the weight of her mountainous hairdos, she didn't feel her head wobbling on her shoulders. Hilary Mantel, Royal Bodies Writing about the Windsors from the London Review of Books found in their wonderful bookshop this week ❤️📚 #SundaySentence

So go ahead, pray to whichever god Makes you the most happy Me? I'll take that chevron of geese Just now, over your left shoulder Crossing in front of the moon. #SundaySentence from "We All Have Our Gods" by Charles Finn #todayspoem What was YOUR favorite sentence of the week? Share with us!

“Their marriage had ceased to be conjugal; his body did not conjugate hers; there was no grammar between them.” ~Namwali Serpell, ‘The Old Drift’ #SundaySentence

“If there were ‘new women’, really, in 1907, then you could hardly find a better example than Mary Mallon, a single, childless, domestic laborer pinned to the floor of a careening Health Department ambulance.” Another #SundaySentence from Anthony Bourdain’s “Typhoid Mary”

I am accomplishing quite a lot in my own nice quiet noisy way. ~May Sarton, "As We Are Now" #SundaySentence (I don't say this frequently or lightly, but THIS IS A PERFECT BOOK. It can be read in one sitting but I stretched my time with it over a week, savoring it like a piece of candy in my mouth.)

September's installment of The Month in Photos is very Eureka Springs-centric. Pics include the Jeep parade, the Run Unicorn Run, and Hillbilly Jim taking a bath. Oh, and #cats, of course. See the photos at Van-ishing America: davidabrams.substack.com/p/the-month-...

"Unlike its French namesake, Paris, Texas, should probably be called the City of Darkness." New post up at Van-ishing America: davidabrams.substack.com/p/one-night-... This was a hard one to write, and a hard one to read, but once I learned the facts about Paris' history, I couldn't look away.

From a substack post dated 03OCT2025 written by Mathilda Ferguson, entitled "The Silent Dialogue: How Literature Cultivates the Landscape of the Heart" this hopeful #SundaySentence: "The cultivation of a single reader's heart, when multiplied, tills the earth for a more compassionate society."