Kimberly Hirsh

📚💬 “Ghost stories, for good or ill, are how cities make sense of themselves: how they narrate the tragedies of their last, weave cautionary tales for the future.“Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻

📚💬 “…surely ghosts will follow wherever there is bad record keeping.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻

📚💬 “Here, then, is a central paradox in the way that ghosts work: to turn the living into ghosts is to empty them out, rob them of something vital; to keep the dead alive as ghosts is to fill them up with memory and history, to keep alive a thing that would otherwise be lost.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, writing about the dissonance between Richmond’s history as the home of slave trade and torture and the fact that all Richmond’s ghosts are white 👻

📚💬 “Romantic heroes are the greatest cryptids of all.” Zoraida Córdova, Kiss the Girl 🧜‍♀️

📚💬 “The contemporary attitude toward Spiritualism as a particularly ridiculous belief stems in no small part from the misogyny with which it was attacked in the second half of the nineteenth century.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻

📚💬 “Ghosts, you could say, flock to women left alone.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻

📚💬 “Even though the soles of her feet felt like she was walking on broken glass, she glided across the greenroom and stood face-to-face with her father.” Zoraida Córdova bringing a little Hans Christian Andersen to her Disney-inspired Little Mermaid romance retelling, Kiss the Girl 🧜‍♀️

📚💬 “Live in a house for any length of time, and you make it your own memory palace.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻

📚💬 “Uncomfortable truths, buried secrets, disputed accounts: ghost stories side out of the shadowlands, a response to the ambiguous and poorly understood.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻

📚💬 “Those aspects of a life that are discontinuous, fragmented, or unexpected, are made whole through the ghost story.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻

📚💬 “A haunted house is a memory palace made real: a physical space that retains memories that might otherwise be forgotten or that might remain only in fragments.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻

📚💬 “The past we’re most afraid to speak aloud of in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.” Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places 👻

Thank you @cygnoir@social.lol for pointing the way to this beautiful thread about the power of connections we make online. 📚💬 “She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.” ― Lev Grossman, The Magician King

📚💬 " ChatGPT has access to every poem ever written, at least in theory, but it can’t feel anything when it generates a poem from a prompt. Is this still poetry?" John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

📚💬 “It’s a near certainty that generative AI can have some positive effects on human writing, but for that to be true, we must hold fast to what makes writing meaningful to humans.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

📚💬 “What do we make of a technology that is simultaneously undeniably powerful, has access to all the information in the world, and can produce outputs at a speed unmatchable by humans, but at the same time is also untethered from reality?” John Warner, More Than Words

📚💬 “The things ChatGPT is ‘smarter’ at… are relatively limited as compared to our human capacities for experience, reflection, analysis, and creativity…” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

📚💬 “It’s not that ChatGPT makes stuff up. It has no capacity for discerning something true from something not true. Truth is irrelevant to its operations.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

📚💬 “Large language models do not ‘write.’ They generate syntax.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

📚💬 “Removing thinking from writing renders an act not writing.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

📚💬 “…ChatGPT cannot write. Generating syntax is not the same thing as writing. Writing is an embodied act of thinking and feeling. Writing is communicating with intention.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

📚💬 “…segregating people by those who are allowed and empowered to engage with a genuine process of writing from those who outsource it to AI is hardly democratic. It mistakes product for process.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

📚💬 “‘That was it,’ Maggie said with a laugh. ‘I was bright. Brie was sweet.’” Nora Roberts, Born in Fire

📚💬 “All you need for Paris, Maggie, is a romantic heart.” Nora Roberts, Born in Fire