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05d6d63 Her constant orders for beheading are shocking to those modern critics of children's literature who feel that juvenile fiction should be free of all violence and especially violence with Freudian undertones. Even the Oz books of L. Frank Baum, so singularly free of the horrors to be found in Grimm and Andersen, contain many scenes of decapitation. As far as I know, there have been no empirical studies of how children react to such scenes and what harm if any is done to their psyche. My guess is that the normal child finds it all very amusing and is not damaged in the least, but that books like and should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis. children death literature media reading Martin Gardner
098ab64 Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature. literature Gustave Flaubert
1c6ec91 Through books I discovered everything to be loved, explored, visited, communed with. I was enriched and given all the blueprints to a marvelous life, I was consoled in adversity, I was prepared for both joys and sorrows, I acquired one of the most precious sources of strength of all: an understanding of human beings, insight into their motivations. literature reading words Anaïs Nin
6b77363 On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men. literature writing Heather O'Neill
db05546 The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery. literature mystery Flannery O'Connor
fc4af5c Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too. literature readers Neil Gaiman
e1a3a1b Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love. desire eros eros-the-bittersweet literature novels philosophy reading writing writing-craft Anne Carson
f85696c That's the thing about living vicariously; it's so much faster than actual living. life life-quotes literature living quotes Audrey Niffenegger
9323d5c Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them. literature reading words Elizabeth von Arnim
df37efd Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties. anxiety canon literature Harold Bloom
f5847f5 I'm sorry,' she said to each of the dead as she unzipped and unfastened their things, 'I'm sorry Courtney. I'm sorry Marcus. I'm sorry Rachel. I'm sorry Jon. I'm sorry I'm alive and you're dead. I'm sorry I was asleep. I'm sorry I didn't save you and now I'm taking your things. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. books dark gavriel holly-black literature paranormal paranormal-romance romance tana-bach the-coldest-girl-in-coldtown vampires ya Holly Black
fee373b "Are you sure?" Aidan asked, "Gavriel's still a vampire." "He warned me about you and about them. He didn't have to. I'm not going to repay that by-" she hesitated, then frowned. "What did you call him?" "That's his name," Aidan sighed, "Gavriel. The other vampires, while they were tying me to the bed, they said his name." "Oh." With a final tug she pulled the blanked free and tossed it over to 'Gavriel" beautiful books dark gavriel holly-black literature paranormal paranormal-romance romance tana-bach the-coldest-girl-in-coldtown vampires ya Holly Black
9ec904f A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements. fiction life literature plan plot plot-device real-life reality Marisha Pessl
209e94e He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like a traveller in unknown countries and as he pushed forward the enterprise fascinated him; he read emotionally, as other men read pure literature, and his heart leaped as he discovered in noble words what himself had obscurely felt. literature reading words W. Somerset Maugham
0ef2444 You said you were allowed to lose it,' some part of her reminded herself. 'Not yet, not yet. books dark gavriel holly-black literature paranormal paranormal-romance romance tana-bach the-coldest-girl-in-coldtown vampires ya Holly Black
d322dc9 Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't. literature nadine-gordimer writing Christopher Hitchens
827c93a Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. literature Henry David Thoreau
09e2d46 People perish. Books are immortal. historical literature Robert Harris
1dcc893 The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important. islamism literature Nadeem Aslam
ee2f1d5 We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer. books growth literature meaning reading words Vladimir Nabokov
284f72f Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe. imagination literature science Ray Bradbury
7f8a977 We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there... literature reading words Manguel Alberto
0e50e5c It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in , for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again. This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since , but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores. 1960s countryside cruelty earl-of-bessborough england europe gassing hampshire hiroshima jane-austen literary-criticism literature mansions massacre meadow myxomatosis napoleon napoleonic-wars new-forest persuasion-novel quiet rabbits richard-adams silence sussex theatre-of-ancient-greece townships war-memorials watership-down wind-in-the-willows women world-war-ii Christopher Hitchens
a8d2c51 To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions--there we have none. freedom literature reading words Virginia Woolf
c845141 She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one. literature reading words Virginia Woolf
a90a88b Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. literature reading words Julian Barnes
81822f4 So Matilda's strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. literature reading Roald Dahl
89af0cb In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home. literature reading words Henry David Thoreau
532007f There is so much in the world for us if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it ourselves- so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful for. literature thankful l.m. montgomery
121d680 "These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil--an acute form of Evil--which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.' evil literature morality Georges Bataille
1f17f1d "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes." -- literature morality azar Nafisi
bdef74e Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness. humanity literature reading Harold Bloom
42ea1d6 "Behind Tana there was the sounds of splintering wood, as though something very large had hot the door. "No," she said softly, "Oh no. No." "Leave me," said Gavriel. ....."Shut up or I might," she told him." books dark gavriel holly-black literature paranormal paranormal-romance romance tana-bach the-coldest-girl-in-coldtown vampires ya Holly Black
5b45961 Fuck literature. literature Ernest Hemingway
2b7f2f5 She would go off in the morning with the punt full of books, and spend long glorious days away in the forest lying on the green springy carpet of whortleberries, reading. She would most diligently work at furnishing her empty mind. She would sternly endeavour to train it not to jump. literature mind reading words Elizabeth von Arnim
fef39ca And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had 'walked over our grave,' as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us - the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser. literature reading recognition words Alberto Manguel
5f6672a On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book. literature reading words Marcel Proust
dc1b87d Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on a bus. chekhov literature reading Francine Prose
f8846c1 In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself. literature John Steinbeck
38025b8 How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. literature reading words Henry David Thoreau
275133e One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love. literature Alain de Botton
6ffb76b In the dream, Tana's mother loved her more than anyone or anything. More than death. books dark gavriel holly-black literature paranormal paranormal-romance romance tana-bach the-coldest-girl-in-coldtown vampires ya Holly Black
7310826 His voice had a faint trace of an accent she couldn't place - one that made her pretty sure he was no local kid infected the night before. books dark gavriel holly-black literature paranormal paranormal-romance romance tana-bach the-coldest-girl-in-coldtown vampires ya Holly Black
5224366 He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn't deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies... Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it. intelligence literature reading talent words Enrique Vila-Matas
24eb21e Have you ever looked at, say, a picture or a great building or read a paragraph in a book and felt the world suddenly expand and, in the same instant, contract and harden into a kernel of perfect purity? Do you know what I mean? Everything suddenly fits, everything's in its place. connection literature reading words Carol Shields
a9c655a Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion. literature religion Carmen Maria Machado
0145bbd The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much 'relevance'. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic. literature Edward St. Aubyn
8161539 Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. fonts letters literature power typeface typography words writing H.G. Wells
4b9a26d What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies. literature writers writing Julian Barnes
89722b2 In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them. literature Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
2791569 The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller. imagination literature science-fiction story Ursula K. Le Guin
d4d3165 So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place. finding-meaning healing inspiration literature philosophy poetry reading solace tough-life Jeanette Winterson
d0226df It is right that you should read according to your temperament, occupations, hobbies, and vocations. But it is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar, unwilling to explore the unfamiliar. In science, we respect the research worker. In literature, we should not always read the books blessed by the majority. literature unfamiliar Anaïs Nin
b4a5070 It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life. literature reading words Henry David Thoreau
79db7f7 Is it foolish to care for non-existent folk? Then, leave me to my foolishness. empathy feelings literature writing Piers Anthony
0d2ece0 Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty--or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne's thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or 'Eurocentric'; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the 'radical'; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly 'committed'. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the 'smelly little orthodoxies'--tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote . My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann's point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo'. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between. apoliticism argument atheism berlin bought-priesthood cape-coloureds cold-war communism conviction critical-thinking enlightenment euphemism eurocentricism faith film george-hw-bush george-orwell german-people germany groupthink hedonism humanism individualism irony journalism left-wing-politics lies literary-criticism literature los-angeles margaret-thatcher monotheism munich orthodoxy personality-politics politics polytheism populism postmodernism potus progress radical-politics religion right-wing-politics ronald-reagan russia science sectarianism self-love self-pity socialism solipsism south-africa soviet-union thomas-mann totalitarianism tribalism truth united-states xhosa-people zulu-people Christopher Hitchens
078cd8c Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. delillo literature terror Don DeLillo
4dc4a38 Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal's great foe William F. Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right's less towering intellects as my foil. The response to the show made my day, and then my week. Yet almost every time I go to a TV studio, I feel faintly guilty. This is pre-eminently the 'soft' world of dream and illusion and 'perception': it has only a surrogate relationship to the 'hard' world of printed words and written-down concepts to which I've tried to dedicate my life, and that surrogate relationship, while it, too, may be 'verbal,' consists of being glib rather than fluent, fast rather than quick, sharp rather than pointed. It means reveling in the fact that I have a meretricious, want-it-both-ways side. My only excuse is to say that at least I do not pretend that this is not so. cable-television cable-television-in-the-us conservatism conservatism-in-the-us gore-vidal guilt illusion literature perception sex television united-states william-f-buckley Christopher Hitchens
545d004 "Two girls walk past in gargantuan heels and dresses so tight that their skin is spilling out, and one of them says to the other, "Wait, who the fuck is Lewis Carroll?" and in my imagination I pull a gun out of my pocket, shoot them both and then shoot myself." humor lewis-carroll literature Alice Oseman
22646c6 Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power. feminism literature love patriarchy relationships bell hooks
586ad29 Le Poete est semblable au prince des nuees Qui hante la tempete et se rit de l'archer; Exile sur le sol au milieu des huees, Ses ailes de geant l'empechent de marcher. poets literature mundane mundane-reality poetry Charles Baudelaire
a0f0707 If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. culture literature Wallace Stegner
86db031 An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships--and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes--husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer... history literature Tom Stoppard
2e25168 She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price. literature women Dai Sijie
c8dca5e I'm interested in things women do that aren't spoken about. Manto's stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster. life literature pakistan pakistani saadat-hasan-manto stories taboo women writing Mohsin Hamid
9a6f52c "You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.' literature Orson Scott Card
7718289 please,Tana,please.' -lots of characters in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown books dark gavriel holly-black literature paranormal paranormal-romance romance tana-bach the-coldest-girl-in-coldtown vampires ya Holly Black
6344e30 I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language. library literature poetry reading words Billy Collins
2fdfc56 The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination. literary-theory literature Charles Simic
39cd680 Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis's comments on them, and burned them. craft literature poetry self-confidence skill writing A.S. Byatt
cb01293 In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. 'We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,' writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of Maillard bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line what lesser minds might have taken pages to express. We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity. (p 207) engineering literature simplicity words writing Alain de Botton
a8c2bb6 Evidently, I'd suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book. coolness humanity-and-society invention literature worldview Tom Robbins
ed1d4a8 I am gone tomorrow. And there and gone again by the time you read this. literature salvador-plascencia the-people-of-paper Salvador Plascencia
420640c Real people are made out of a whole lot of things--flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words. fictional-characters literature reality words Thomas C. Foster
71cc002 ...the cab of the truck heated up nicely, its windows fogging. I felt like a Dickens character. I thought about explaining that to Mouse, just to occupy my thoughts, but he was suffering enough without being forced to endure Dickens, even by proxy. literature Jim Butcher
291b907 It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. literature perception reading words Henry David Thoreau
462e53c It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. literature reading words Henry David Thoreau
06192f3 I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that , in his second novel, , published in 1935, had borrowed from for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys and The Kike and Mrs. Bendigo and the rest of the bums and losers keep up a barrage of song snatches, fractured prayers, curses, and crackpot reminiscences. But only on my most recent reading of did I discover, in the middle of the long and intricate mock-Shakespeare scene at the National Library, the line 'Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's daughter.' So now I think Orwell quarried his title from there, too. george-orwell influence james-joyce literary-criticism literature trafalgar-square ulysses-novel Christopher Hitchens
82ccab0 "One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his lifetime there had only been two men in the world, in all the fields of human achievement, science, literature, politics, anything you like, who qualified for the Bradman class. For those not familiar with cricket, or with Hardy's personal idiom, I ought to mention that "the Bradman class" denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was Lenin and the other Einstein." archimedes bradman-class cambridge count-lev-nikolayevich-tolstoy einstein g-h-hardy godfrey-hardy godfrey-harold-hardy isaac-newton lenin leo-tolstoy lev-nikolayevich-tolstoy literature newton politics science shakespeare tolstoy vladimir-ilyich-lenin vladimir-lenin william-shakespeare C.P. Snow
4a2a5fd Words are instruments, they are tools that, in their different ways, are as effective as any sharp edge or violate chemical. They are, like coins, items of great value, but they represent a currency that, well spent, returns ever greater riches. inspirational literature power-of-words words Tim Radford
8784824 But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No. literature David Mitchell
728ee72 Water, wind and birdsong were the echoes in this quiet place of a great chiming symphony that was surging around the world. Knee-deep in grasses and moon daisies, Stella stood and listened, swaying a little as the flowers and trees were swaying, her spirit voice singing loudly, though her lips were still, and every pulse in her body beating its hammer strokes in time to the song. inspirational literature Elizabeth Goudge
21e0e7d Did you think of anything when Miss Marcy said Scoatney Hall was being re-opened? I thought of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice - where Mrs. Bennet says 'Netherfield Park is let a last.' And then Mr. Bennet goes over to call on the rich new owner. literature pride-and-prejudice Dodie Smith
3c079eb "Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs... classic gormenghast gothic literature Mervyn Peake
5e41630 It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble. literature philosophy-of-life Alain de Botton
d1c7a38 Bah! You want to hear the vilest thing a man's done and you want him to be a hero at the same time! literature Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8d7a700 But he'll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one's soul. literature scotland Alexander McCall Smith
5e3b510 Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents. literature Joyce Carol Oates
cca2b67 Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide--one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave--of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers. abu-musab-al-zarqawi al-qaeda al-qaeda-in-iraq arab-spring death death-of-osama-bin-laden exorcism feminism iraq islamism life literature music osama-bin-laden pakistan secularism september-11-attacks sunni-islam terrorism theocracy Christopher Hitchens
781f80a "Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it." fantasy-fiction literature Ursula K. Le Guin
d7c3c90 How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display. literature philosophy Nadeem Aslam
5143ff1 You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn't much time left over for emotion recollected in tranquillity. literature writing Jay McInerney
981cf6c The topography of literature, the fact in fiction,is one of my pleasures -- I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and imagined road. literature place topography Paul Theroux
25b20c8 Mr. Herbert Demarest Alexander Hamilton Jr. High 2236 Bedford Avenue Brooklyn NY Dear Mr Demarest, Then why don't you give him 'Withering Heights'? At least Heathcoat knew how to kick some ass. Chas. Banks 3d Base literature principal Steve Kluger
4390a7c There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann. literature topical-trash Vladimir Nabokov
35ecc5f Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure. fiction literature reading words Mario Vargas Llosa
c52f424 This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that. humor literature short-story Miranda July
096ea1b I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that. communion feminism literature self-love bell hooks
c8f9abe Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. class gender literature poetry prose race Audre Lorde
1b5f450 Books do pretend ...but squeezed in between is even more that is true--without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see? fiction literature reading truth Matthew Pearl
04cc68b Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith. bookish books heroine introversion introvert irvine-welsh library literature read reader reading reading-books skagboys solitude zenith Irvine Welsh
0d61157 Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations--that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls. literature reading words writing Richard Flanagan
30a7fd1 I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life. language literature reading words writing Anaïs Nin
1d4f614 If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people -- a very few people, but a few novelists are among them -- are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent. Perhaps the searchers will fail, perhaps it is impossible for the instrument of contemplation to contemplate itself, perhaps if it is possible it means the end of imaginative literature -- [...] anyhow--that way lies movement and even combustion for the novel, for if the novelist sees himself differently, he will see his characters differently and a new system of lighting will result. imagination literature movement novel E.M. Forster
68627f1 lm 'kn 'Hsb nfsy 'dyban sh`ran. fm knt 'ktbh mn Hyn l~ akhr kn mn qbyl lSHf@ lmsly@, l mn l'db. lkny knt fym byny wbyn nfsy 'Hbs 'mlan fy 'n ttH ly fy ywm mn l'ym frS@ khlq shy mn l'db, nshyd `Zym jry' llHnyn wlHy@ literature Hermann Hesse
dbbf5b6 This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting out of the boundaries of one's own experience. There's a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. Or to go deeper within ourselves, to be more aware of what it means to be heartbroken, or ill, or six, or ninety-six, or completely lost. Not just versions of our self rendered awesome and eternally justified and always right, living in a world in which other people only exist to help reinforce our magnificence, though those kinds of books and movies exist in abundance to cater to the male imagination. Which is a reminder that literature and art can also help us fail at empathy if it sequesters us in the Big Old Fortress of Magnificent Me. empathy literature Rebecca Solnit
6b727bb Oh? And what's so stinking about it?. literature reading Anthony Burgess
ed23624 "Elgin himself looked ten years younger, now that he'd cast the die, but I thought exuberance had got the better of him when he strode into the saloon later, threw The Origin of Species on the table and announced: "It's very original, no doubt, but not for a hot evening. What I need is some trollop." I couldn't believe my ears, and him a church-goer, too. "Well, my lord, I dunno," says I. "Tientsin ain't much of a place, but I'll see what I can drum up --" "Michel's been reading Doctor Thorne since Taku," cried he. "He must have finished it by now, surely! Ask him, Flashman, will you?" So I did, and had my ignorance, enlightened." literature misunderstanding trollope George MacDonald Fraser
edae8e2 "If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat." artistry literature poet poetic poetry pretentious pretentiousness the-writing-life write writer writing writing-advice Annie Dillard
ff5921a "There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly." humor literature Ursula K. Le Guin
7ebf00c The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature. literature Gustave Flaubert
adbb30f Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law. Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli, or Christ, it's here. And the hour's late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors... All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need intact and safe. We're not out to incite or anger anyone yet. For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is dead, perhaps for good... Right now we have a horrible job; we're waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end. It's not pleasant, but then we're not in control, we're the odd minority crying in the wilderness. When the war's over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world. knowledge literature memory prophets Ray Bradbury
b9f7a66 Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. history life literature time Julian Barnes
d0dc099 Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality. literature literature-quotes nick-hornby novel Nick Hornby
234fed3 In my early teens, I heard about and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, was my first foray into consuming smut. It was because of Burroughs that I knew about the particular musk that blooms when a rectum is penetrated, and that death-by-hanging produces spontaneous trouser tents. The first Burroughs I read was , but I buried myself in a few of his stories, and thus the arc of my recollection is just as non-linear as his narrative. coming-of-age erotica homosexuality literature queer william-s-burroughs youth Peter Dubé
61bef8e "YOUR BOREDOM IS YOUR PROBLEM," said Owen Meany. "IT'S YOUR LACK OF IMAGINATION THAT BORES YOU. HARDY HAS THE WORLD FIGURED OUT. TESS IS DOOMED. FATE HAS IT IN FOR HER. SHE'S A VICTIM; IF YOU'RE A VICTIM, THE WORLD WILL USE YOU. WHY SHOULD SOMEONE WHO'S GOT SUCH A WORKED-OUT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD BORE YOU? WHY SHOULDN'T YOU BE INTERESTED IN SOMEONE WHO'S WORKED OUT A WAY TO SEE THE WORLD? THAT'S WHAT MAKES WRITERS INTERESTING!" imagination literature John Irving
1a5bf12 One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. english herman-melville history literature masterpiece moby-dick novel prose quotes Herman Melville
bcefdaa And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace. books literature reading words Jonathan Franzen
d49068d Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it. heritage legacy literature worship Harold Bloom
cbed636 "When compiled its list of the one hundred best novels written in English, do you know that was number twelve?" She stopped pacing and glared at Jane. "And do you know where was?" she asked. She looked at the four of them in turn, but nobody answered her. "Number fifty-two!" she shrieked. "Fifty-two! Below that pornographic travesty !" She spat the title as if it were poison. "Below ! Below . Have you ever tried to read ? Have you ever finished it? No, you haven't. No one has. They just carry it around and lie about having read it." literature Michael Thomas Ford
4838597 Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies. literature reading words writing Jonathan Franzen
9825df7 The art teacher's scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. 'As the title suggests,' Mr Dunwoody saw the book'd caught my attention, 'it's about the history of opticians. What are you about? literature David Mitchell
27d1aab "Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too." art artist artistry discipline literature read reader reading the-writing-life write writer writing writing-advice Annie Dillard
5a3a69f And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed. literature self Jeanette Winterson
b7a1823 Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say a shocking, realization. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky's indifferent gaze and the harsh air's damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet. john-banville literature John Banville
af66f46 "On THE AMBER SPYGLASS: "If this plotline was a motorist, it would have been arrested for driving while intoxicated, if it had not perished in the horrible drunk accident where it went headlong over the cliff of the author's preachy message, tumbled down the rocky hillside, crashed, and burned." literature philip-pullman plotting John C. Wright
d9aa55a I was hungry when I left Pyongyang. I wasn't hungry just for a bookshop that sold books that weren't about Fat Man and Little Boy. I wasn't ravenous just for a newspaper that had no pictures of F.M. and L.B. I wasn't starving just for a TV program or a piece of music or theater or cinema that wasn't cultist and hero-worshiping. I was . I got off the North Korean plane in Shenyang, one of the provincial capitals of Manchuria, and the airport buffet looked like a cornucopia. I fell on the food, only to find that I couldn't do it justice, because my stomach had shrunk. And as a foreign tourist in North Korea, under the care of vigilant minders who wanted me to see only the best, I had enjoyed the finest fare available. airports books cinema cults food hero-worship hunger kim-il-sung kim-jong-il literature manchuria music newspapers north-korea propaganda pyongyang shenyang television theatre totalitarianism tourism tourism-in-north-korea Christopher Hitchens
d7ef0d9 The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself. literature music Peter Ackroyd
b2db060 The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. czech-literature foolishness literature novel philosophy questions stupidity Milan Kundera
5875386 I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in , and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was obliterated? edward-said literary-criticism literature postmodernism Christopher Hitchens
8f5e92a Imagine that the genome is a book. There are twenty-three chapters, called CHROMOSOMES. Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called GENES. Each story is made up of paragraphs, called EXTONS, which are interrupted by advertisements called INTRONS. Each paragraph is made up of words, called CODONS. Each word is written in letters called BASES. genetics literature literaturegy science science-and-literature Matt Ridley
34a969a Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings. literature reading Mario Vargas Llosa
72ccbf5 Tis true what Hemingway says--if we're lucky enough to live our dreams in youth, as Ernest Hemingway did in 1920's Paris and I did with the Beat poets, then youth's dreams become a moveable feast you take wherever you go--youthful love remains the repast plentiful; exquisite, substantive and good. You can live on happy memories. Eat of them forever. friendship hemingway kerouac literature paris Alison Winfield Burns
7235232 Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it. life literature philosophy writing Ernest Hemingway
571926d Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you. Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged. encouragement literature reading skill writers writers-on-reading writing Ernest Hemingway
ec388df It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with all your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them. literature poetry reading Ray Bradbury
5944ad4 Can you blame me, my dear, for looking on this attachment as a romantic folly inspired by that cursed Shakespeare who will poke his nose where he is not wanted? literature romance shakespeare Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3ee5066 Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles. literature proust reading remembrance-of-things-past robert-musil the-man-without-qualities Lorrie Moore
b6c5b23 "Habia leido lo bastante como para apreciar mi ingenio literario, pero no lo bastante como para identificar mis fuentes de conocimiento. Me encantan las mujeres asi. Podia decirle cosas como: "La principal diferencia entre la felicidad y la alegria es que la felicidad es solida, mientras que la alegria es liquida" y, escudandome en su ignorancia de Salinger, sentirme ingenioso, seductor y, porque no decirlo, joven. Notaba que Ernie me miraba fijamente mientras yo me daba pisto, pero que diablos, pensaba yo. Un hombre tiene derecho a flirtear." español flirting literatura literature literature-quotes spanish David Mitchell
f285331 Energy manipulation took place completely in mind,same way believing in telepathy caused telepathic abilities to grow STRONGER. art chakras christina-westover energy-manipulation fiction imagination inspirational jack-kerouac literature poetry san-francisco telepathist telepathy Christina Westover
5c2154c What's missing from the literature of our species are the stories of the peasants. The filthy illiterate. Those with no firm address, no surname. No one to impress, nothing to lose. But the poor tell stories, too. literature nutcracker poor-people stories stories-of-people Gregory Maguire
a13727d It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful. feminism literature Zora Neale Hurston
5b86f74 "Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it. The value judgement concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction. Every readable novel can give true pleasure. Every novel read by choice is read because it gives true pleasure. Literature consists of many genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, western, army life, young adult, thriller, etc., etc.... and the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as erotic Regency, noir police procedural, or historical thriller with zombies. Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral. Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior. genre literature Ursula K. Le Guin
573254d The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge. literature quest writing Thomas C. Foster
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