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276ada6 I want all the books on the shelves. I want the books with dinosaur words like that show the skeletons in our national closet. I want books with the word cunt as well as the word kike. Words don't scare me. Suppressing them does. racism literature redaction suppression misogyny language censorship E.L. Konigsburg
a13727d It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful. literature feminism Zora Neale Hurston
d8a30bf (from his random observations after reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens) In the Old Curiosity Shop I discovered that in the character of Dick Swiveller, Dickens provided P.G. Wodehouse with pretty much the whole of his oeuvre. In David Copperfield, David's bosses Spenlow and Jorkins are what must be the earliest fictional representations of good cop/bad cop. literature Nick Hornby
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." literature spanish literature-quotes español literatura flirting David Mitchell
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. literature genre Ursula K. Le Guin
f285331 Energy manipulation took place completely in mind,same way believing in telepathy caused telepathic abilities to grow STRONGER. literature fiction poetry imagination inspirational chakras christina-westover energy-manipulation telepathist telepathy san-francisco art jack-kerouac Christina Westover
bfa4a31 A fear of the unknown: what was that called? Worse yet: a fear of the known. literature Joyce Carol Oates
09bb1ff The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it. literature corporate-greed Annie Proulx
0ee66d1 I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. fate shakespeare literature friends literary-references lolita vladimir-nabokov emma-bovary madame-bovary gustave-flaubert king-lear expectations Vladimir Nabokov
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 stories-of-people poor-people nutcracker stories Gregory Maguire
37f9cf6 Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions? literature written-on-the-body Jeanette Winterson
a8a9b87 Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it. Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. literature Azar Nafisi
341afff Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it, is in the first place 'literary', which is to say personal and passionate. It is not philosophy, politics, or institutionalised religion. At its strongest - Johnson, Hazlitt, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Paul Valeer, among others - it is a kind of wisdom literature, and so a meditation upon life. Yet any distinction between literature and life is misleading. Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form. literature Harold Bloom
f5a34f9 Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us. literature self-perception conventional-wisdom legacy Harold Bloom
1d6f3cc I have tried to write about politics in an allusive manner that draws upon other interests and to approach literature and criticism without ignoring the political dimension. Even if I have failed in this synthesis, I have found the attempt worth making. literature politics Christopher Hitchens
39be2a2 And if I am not mistaken here is the secret of the greatness that was Spain. In Spain it is men that are the poems, the pictures and the buildings. Men are its philosophies. They lived, these Spaniards of the Golden Age; they felt and did; they did not think. Life was what they sought and found, life in its turmoil, its fervour and its variety. Passion was the seed that brought them forth and passion was the flower they bore. But passion alone cannot give rise to a great art. In the arts the Spaniards invented nothing. They did little in any of those they practised, but give a local colour to a virtuosity they borrowed from abroad. Their literature, as I have ventured to remark, was not of the highest rank; they were taught to paint by foreign masters, but, inapt pupils, gave birth to one painter only of the very first class; they owed their architecture to the Moors, the French and the Italians, and the works themselves produced were best when they departed least from their patterns. Their preeminence was great, but it lay in another direction: it was a preeminence of character. In this I think they have been surpassed by none and equalled only by the ancient Romans. It looks as though all the energy, all the originality, of this vigorous race had been disposed to one end and one end only, the creation of man. It is not in art that they excelled, they excelled in what is greater than art--in man. But it is thought that has the last word. literature character creation-of-man spaniards the-golden-age the-last-word art thought W. Somerset Maugham
5ef1967 Realizm: Zaiats bezhit bystree Cherepakhi. Namnogo bystree. I eshche on soobrazitel'nei. Poetomu on pobezhdaet. Rano ili pozdno. OK? Sentimental'nyi romantizm: Samodovol'nyi zaiats prikornul u obochiny, a nravstvenno ustoichivaia Cherepakha kovyliaet k finishu. Siurrealizm (ili reklamnyi rolik): Cherepakha, snabzhennaia rolikovymi kon'kami i akkuratnym riukzachkom iz chernoi kozhi, v solntsezashchitnykh ochkakh, legko mchit vpered, a ostavlennyi pozadi zaichishka kusaet sebia za khvost. Iz chastnoi perepiski: Milyi Pushistik, pripusti vpered i dozhdis' menia u izgorodi. Ia budu na meste kak tol'ko mne udastsia uiti ot nikh. Ne mozhet byt', chtoby oni gnalis' za nami. Vsegda tvoia, Shelli. Detskaia skazka noveishego vremeni (napisana eks-khippi): Zaiats i Cherepakha, razocharovavshis' v sotsial'nykh i politicheskikh strukturakh, kotorye razzhigaiut v obshchestve dukh sopernichestva, pokidaiut trassu i mirno dozhivaiut svoi dni v ubogoi iurte, otkazyvaias' davat' interv'iu. Limerik: Zhila byla cherepashka St'iu\ Prostaia kak du-bi-du\ Liubila pokoi i uiut\ i kak-to svalilas' v sup. Post-modernizm: Ia, avtor, napisal etu knigu. Eto chistyi konstrukt. Zaiats i Cherepakha na samom dele ne sushchestvuiut, nadeius' vy eto ponimaete? literature Julian Barnes
d3856ac "Vladimir Nabokov "... one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do no have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous achievement of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is - a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) - a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book." -- Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature" literature Vladimir Nabokov
749c005 I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer... I would rather not dwell upon him at all, but I cannot help it-- he is surging up from under my pen. Today one does not hear much about him; and this is good, for it proves that I was right in resisting his evil spell, right in experiencing a creepy chill down my spine whenever this or that new book of his touched my hand. The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates. Lean and arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents. Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words, a title he valued higher than that of a writer; personally, I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other; and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one's personal truth. I had known his books before I knew him; a faint disgust was already replacing the aesthetic pleasure which I had suffered his first novel to give me. At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream- familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose... but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one's shivering soul. But how dangerous he was in his prime, what venom he squirted, with what whips he lashed when provoked! The tornado of his passing satire left a barren waste where felled oaks lay in a row, and the dust still twisted, and the unfortunate author of some adverse review, howling with pain, spun like a top in the dust. literature Vladimir Nabokov
270c760 I was beginning to understand something I couldn't articulate. It was a jazzy feeling in my chest, a fluttering, a kind of buzzing in my brain. Warmth. Life. The circulation of blood. Sanguinity. I don't know. I understood the enormous risk of telling the truth, how the telling could result in every level of hell reigning down on you, your skin scorched to the bone and then bone to ash and then nothing but a lingering odour of shame and decomposition, but now I was also beginning to understand the new and alien feeling of taking the risk and having the person on the other end of the telling, the listener, say: Bad shit at home? You guys are running away? Yeah, I said. I understand, said, Noehmi. literature life irma-voth miriam-toews feeling novel Miriam Toews
728e4b2 I clap my hands together. (Where do I get the strength, the burst of energy?) To chase away the ghosts. Dispel my fears. Arrange the dream. Maintain a kind of balance literature Anne Hébert
b1e0876 That's what it means to be out of your mind. To let yourself be carried away by a dream. To give it room, let it grow wild and thick, until it overruns you. literature fiction Anne Hébert
6f11e54 O, I do read Indian novels sometimes. But you know, Ms Rupinder, what we Indians want in literature, at least the kind written in English, is not literature at all, but flattery. We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful, sensitive, profound, valorous, wounded, tolerant and funny beings. All that Jhumpa Lahiri stuff. But the truth is, we are absolutely nothing of that kind. What are we, then, Ms Rupinder? We are animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbour's children in five minutes, and our own in ten. Keep this in mind before you do any business in this country. literature Aravind Adiga
436c519 Imagine the same scene in HAMLET if Pullman had written it. Hamlet, using a mystic pearl, places the poison in the cup to kill Claudius. We are all told Claudius will die by drinking the cup. Then Claudius dies choking on a chicken bone at lunch. Then the Queen dies when Horatio shows her the magical Mirror of Death. This mirror appears in no previous scene, nor is it explained why it exists. Then Ophelia summons up the Ghost from Act One and kills it, while she makes a speech denouncing the evils of religion. Ophelia and Hamlet are parted, as it is revealed in the last act that a curse will befall them if they do not part ways. shakespeare literature his-dark-materials philip-pullman plotting John C. Wright
da62a03 It didn't help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of leading to . If anything, my education gave me the opposite impression, of an end to cultural history round about the time that Forster wrote . The quickest way to kill all love for the classics, I can see now, is to tell young people that nothing else maters, because then all they can do is look at them in a museum of literature, through glass cases. Don't touch! And don't think for a moment that they want to live in the same world as you! And so a lot of adult life -- if your hunger and curiosity haven't been squelched by your education -- is learning to join up the dots that you didn't even know were there. literature Nick Hornby
a4f9cff And speaking of this wonderful machine: [840] I'm puzzled by the difference between Two methods of composing: , the kind Which goes on solely in the poet's mind, A testing of performing words, while he Is soaping a third time one leg, and , The other kind, much more decorous, when He's in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought, The abstract battle is concretely fought. The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar [850] A canceled sunset or restore a star, And thus it physically guides the phrase Toward faint daylight through the inky maze. But method is agony! The brain Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain. A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the will Can interrupt, while the automaton Is taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before. literature writing pencil paper pen teaching Vladimir Nabokov
81d8926 Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries. literature jeanette-winterson Jeanette Winterson
60332e7 "She looked up out of her voice and saw the angel....and the entire message had no words. The entire message will be only the beat and direction of time. Yes is Now. The angel who says, "It's time." "Is it time?" she asked. "Does it hurt?" He will have the most beautiful face she has ever seen. "Oh, babe." The angel starts to cry. "You can't imagine," he said." literature seraphim Denis Johnson
1be78c5 I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down. literature great-writers imitation novelist originality writers Flannery O'Connor
8d1d6dc Words empower us, move us beyond our suffering and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories. words literature suffering words-have-power stories Terry Tempest Williams
48ee5a4 A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you. literature psychoanalysis journey Ursula K. Le Guin
1d40ab1 Irma, she said. But I had started to walk away. I heard her say some more things but by then I had yanked my skirt up and was running down the road away from her and begging the wind to obliterate her voice. She wanted to live with me. She missed me. She wanted me to come back home. She wanted to run away. She was yelling all this stuff and I wanted so badly for her to shut up. She was quiet for a second and I stopped running and turned around once to look at her. She was a thimble-sized girl on the road, a speck of a living thing. Her white-blond hair flew around her head like a small fire and it was all I could see because everything else about her blended in with the countryside. He offered you a what? she yelled. An espresso! I yelled back. It was like yelling at a shorting wire or a burning bush. What is it? she said. Coffee! I yelled. Irma, can I come and live-- I turned around again and began to run. literature fiction funny inspirational novel Miriam Toews
81503f1 The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness). sex literature magic childlessness fable fantasy-literature sexuality literary-criticism Christopher Hitchens
d5ff665 The headlights of parked cars shone through the rain, and the sidewalks extended, empty, into the darkness. Underground, the sewers surged like rivers, and a few blocks away, sirens blared. He was no longer aware of his heart or thoughts, only the image of a sunken face staring up from a well, the paleness rising through the water like polished bone. A ringed hand reached toward it, but as the fingers approached, the face would sink away, its eyes opening, closing, and the droplets of red falling like leaves. He was a child running through an autumn cemetery, leaping over cast iron fences, the rain bleeding into the tombstones and the roofs of the mausoleums, his legs following the wings of a crow, flapping to the north. A hedge of withered roses stood between him and his childhood house. He tripped and grazed his cheek on a manhole, his red blooming in the water. The sun set behind the hill; the house turned black--abandoned and derelict--and Chris knew he had to keep running, ahead, into the unknown. literature identity literary-fiction coming-of-age self-realization Cory Ingram
82d5d4a There's a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It's a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the street, Katya, I felt such a sensation... I have no idea why literature Joyce Carol Oates
37e8add We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies and all the sorrows of familial and passional life. words literature loss reading relationships Harold Bloom
0e98415 We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance. literature truth representation Victor Hugo
dc7173a They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a sextet of calico isotropes and into the street, the elder smiling, along through the crowds and down the road toward the river still single file and with deadpan decorum leaving behind a congregation mute and astounded. literature Cormac McCarthy
02122ff They were...no ordinary group, gathering together to kill an evening, to seek refuge from critical husbands and demanding children while idly discussing their new best-seller. They met because literature was their shared passion. Books were as important to them as breath itself. They shared the ability to immerse themselves in the lives of fictional characters, to argue passionately about the development of plots, about decisions taken, dilemmas resolved. literature reading Gloria Goldreich
dbd5294 "What would you expect to find when the muzzle that has silenced the voices of black men is removed? literature black-powder blackness french protest Jean-Paul Sartre
abc4d93 Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years--about twelve of them--to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted brain to take. Some of the parts must be sculpted at critical times. One cannot, after all, carve out toes unless he knows where the foot will go. We need tools to do some of the fine work. The tools are our childhood experiences. And I'm convinced that one of those experiences must be children's books. And they must be experienced within the early years of our long childhood. experiences literature reading life children-s-lit life-experiences children-s-literature development brains children childhood children-s-books E.L. Konigsburg
5ef7524 I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me. literature ralph-ellison invisible-man civil-rights-movement Ralph Ellison
23104f4 In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us. literature writing tameness wildness Henry David Thoreau
ca7637d "What we mean when speaking of "myth" in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry--all very highly useful and informative in their own right--can't." myth story literature reading education analysis professor Thomas C. Foster
c537748 In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of words together, and we learn what language does and why it matters. this is excellent training for going out into the world and looking at all the unhallowed speech of political statements and news headlines and CDC instructions and seeing how it makes the word or in this case, makes a mess of it. It is the truest, highest purpose of language to make things clear and help us see; when words are used to do the opposite you know you're in trouble and maybe that there's a cover-up. literature Rebecca Solnit
a4a21fc I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present. literature illusion subterfuge drama Iris Murdoch
a5eafc7 "Las autobiografias ya de por si son infumables, !pero anda que las novelitas! Heroe emprende viaje, forastero llega a la ciudad, alguien persigue algo, lo consigue o no lo consigue, conflicto entre voluntades opuestas. "Admiradme, porque soy una metafora"." -- literature spanish novela literatura David Mitchell
274bc02 Every day I would run to the library to get new books. Reading was a passion: I wanted to understand life. I read Dostoevsky and Brehm, Jules Verne and Turgenev, Dickens and the Zhivopisnoye Obozreniye; and the more I read, th emore I doubted everything. Lies surrounded me on all sides; one moment I wanted to run off to the Indian jungle, the next to throw a bomb at the governor-general's house on Tverskaya, the next to hang myself. suicide literature Ilya Ehrenburg
fabc28e No se piensa en nada; las horas pasan. Uno se pasea inmovil por paises que cree ver, y su pensamiento, enlazandose a la ficcion, se recrea en los detalles o sigue el hilo de las aventuras. Se identifica con los personajes; parece que somos nosotros mismos los que participamos bajo sus pieles. literature Gustave Flaubert
db2464b Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no character is created equal. One or two of them get all the breaks; the rest exist to get them to the finish line. literature equality heroes sidekicks Thomas C. Foster
fac1ad8 Since language is the only tool with which writers can reflect and shape a culture, it must be transformed into art. Language is not a limitation on the art of literature; it is a glorification. It has been the scaffolding inside which nations and philosophies have been built, and the language of literature has added the ornamental pediment by which the culture is remembered. literature writing legacy language writers E.L. Konigsburg
6fd4db3 The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that's the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you'll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone's constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it's - if you'll forgive my language - it's bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that's how they like it. They don't transform, they don't stop to smell the roses, they don't sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood - Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren't waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They're not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel - that's finished. literature meaning modern-life novels modernity Paul Murray
fab6132 They were readers for whom literature was a drug, each complex plot line delivering a new high, suspending them above reality, allowing them a magical crossover...They had spoken often, with rueful honesty, of how the books they read represented escape, offered pathways to literary landscapes that intrigued and engrossed...From childhood on, books had been the hot air balloons that carried them above the angry mutterings of quarreling parents, schoolyard rejections, academic boredom...They were of a kind, readers from birth. literature reading Gloria Goldreich
cce4161 They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood. They rode through a region where iron will not rust nor tin tarnish. The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches of dried hide lay like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless void and they passed lurid and austere the black and desiccated shapes of horses and mules that travelers had stood afoot. literature western Cormac McCarthy
50e5c96 His feet went banging down some stairs. He closed his eyes. They went through cinders and dirt, his heels gathering small windrows of trash. A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. The rusting carcass of an automobile passed slowly on his right. Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea. He lay with his head on the moldy upholstery of an old car seat among packingcrates and broken shoes and suncrazed rubber toys in the dark. Something warm was running on his chest. He put up a hand. I am bleeding. Unto my death. literature Cormac McCarthy
68b9ee1 In a sense, Joyce was Beckett's Don Quixote, and Beckett was his Sancho Panza. Joyce aspired to the One; Beckett encapsulated the fragmented many. But as each author accomplished his task, it was in the service of the other. Ultimately, Beckett's landscapes would resound with articulate silence, and his empty spaces would collect within themselves the richness of multiple shadows--a physicist would say the negative particles--of all that exists in absence, as in the white patches of an Abstract Expressionist painting. Becket would evoke, on his canvasses of vast innuendo and through the interstices of conscious and unconscious thought, the richness that Joyce had made explicit in words and intricate structure. literature joyce the-one-and-the-many Lois Gordon
363131f Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently literature perspective perspective-on-life story-telling stories Jeanette Winterson
43854a2 "Here is how I propose to end book-banning in this country once and for all: Every candidate for school committee should be hooked up to a lie detector and asked this question: "Have you read a book from start to finish since high school?" or "Did you even read a book from start to finish in high school?" If the truthful answer is "no," then the candidate should be told politely that he cannot get on the school committee and blow off his big bazoo about how books make children crazy. Whenever ideas are squashed in this country, literate lovers of the American experiment write careful and intricate explanations of why all ideas must be allowed to live. It is time for them to realize that they are attempting to explain America at its bravest and most optimistic to orangutans. From now on, I intend to limit my discourse with dimwitted Savonarolas to this advice: "Have somebody read the First Amendment to the United States Constitution out loud to you, you God damned fool!" Well--the American Civil Liberties Union or somebody like that will come to the scene of trouble, as they always do. They will explain what is in the Constitution, and to whom it applies. They will win. And there will be millions who are bewildered and heartbroken by the legal victory, who think some things should never be said--especially about religion. They are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hi ho." book-banning literature books united-states-of-america first-amendment freedom-of-speech constitution censorship Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
7b18a48 "Raflara dogru ilerledi Stoddart Lectures kitabin birinci cildi ile geri dondu. "Goruyor musunuz?" diye bagirdi muzaffer bir edayla, "Iste hakiki bir kitap. Ne kadar yanilmisim . Bu adam tam bir Belasco!1 Bu buyuk bir zafer. Ne zevkli ne guzel bir secim! Hem haddini bilip sayfalari da kesip azaltmamis. Daha ne istenir ki?" 1 David Belasco (1853 - 1931) Amerikali Oyun yazari. Devasa bir kutuphaneye sahipti." literature F. Scott Fitzgerald
5e3060f Understand something people, we will be hated by many in the name of Christ, ridiculed, mocked, stoned, slaughtered. We will be fined, jailed and killed for our love for Christ. You are supposed to see better with your eyes today, how close this is happening, just prepare your heart and soul to be braver than Peter and not deny Christ in the moment your life might be in jeopardy for Him and what you believe. Apostle Pauls says to live is Christ to die is gain. money words time pain love-quotes literature marriage mind grief feminism loss history reading prayer nature world depression people women freedom dream joy future politics friends leadership quote work inspirational-quotes life-quotes living motivation family destiny imagination fantasy dreams sadness positive-thinking strength music friendship motivational spiritual heart endtime fiction-food-for-though humanity-humour intelligence-is-attractive life-and-living-life-philosophy magic-spirit meditation-men passion-peace patience-johnson pentecost reality-relationship trust-war earning motivational-quotes repentance wisdom-quotes society purpose quotes forgiveness self-improvement power self-help soul patience psychology Patience Johnson
7df70b6 He looks up at her, and behind her, at the sky, which holds more stars than he ever has seen at one time, crowded together, a mess of dust and gems. literature Jhumpa Lahiri
e739ff4 Excellent papier. Rien a voir avec les pates mecaniques d'aujourd'hui... Vous savez quelle est la duree de vie moyenne d'un livre imprime a l'heure actuelle ?... Dis lui, Pablo. - Soixante-dix ans, repondit l'autre avec rancoeur, comme si Corso etait le coupable. Soixante-dix miserables annees. Le frere aine cherchait quelque chose parmi les objets disperses sur la table. Finalement, il s'empara d'une loupe speciale a fort grossissement et l'approcha du livre. - Dans moins d'un siecle, murmura-t-il tandis qu'il soulevait une page pour l'etudier a contre-jour en fermant un oeil, presque tout ce qui se trouve aujourd'hui dans les librairies aura disparu. Mais ces volumes imprimes il y a deux cents ou cinq cents ans, demeureront intacts... Nous avons les livres, comme le monde, que nous meritons... N'est-ce pas, Pablo ? - Des livres de merde pour un monde de merde. literature world books philosophy handmade-books paper Arturo Pérez-Reverte
9f1fd7d I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane. literature truth teaching Mary Rose O'Reilley
231d38b The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children's books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she'd been a little girl. There hadn't been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes. literature novella Joyce Carol Oates
4e46616 "For in America this season is decreed "family season". (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don't have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year's season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year's season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life,, the brute existencial point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie's robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie's frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: "Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you've just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you" literature fiction Joyce Carol Oates
aa51218 "Freaky kids like us can't ever be normal- Tyler says smugly- Our generation is some new kind of "evolutionary development", my shrink says- "Normal" is just "average", not cool. My latest diagnosis is "A.P.M", Acute Premature Melancholia", usually an affliction of late middle age, they think is genetic since Ty Senoir has had it all his life, too. You look if you might be A.P.M, too, Sky: that kind of pissed-off mopey look in your face like you swallowed something really gross and can't spit it out." literature fiction Joyce Carol Oates
9056146 "Playdate. (n) A Date arranged by adults in which young children are brought together, usually at the home of one of them, for the premeditated purpose of "playing". A feature of contemporary American upscale suburban life in which "neighborhoods" have ceased to exist, and children no longer trail in and out of "neighbor childrens" houses or play in "backyards". In the absence of sidewalks in newer "gated" coummunities, children cannot "walk" to playdates but must be driven by adults, usually mothers. A "playdate" is never initiated by the players (i.e., children), but only by their mothers. In American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you've been awaiting." literature fiction novels mystery Joyce Carol Oates
19ef1fd Popular! In America, what else matters? literature popularity Joyce Carol Oates
b1e65ec Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship. words literature reading writing Anne Lamott
cfc4578 If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture. literature reading Edith Wharton
a0a0ae6 And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. literature Ray Bradbury
73aa49e At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered. literature reading feelings books safety Jeanette Winterson
57b6363 I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking. literature philosophy jeanette-winterson Jeanette Winterson
fd7bb52 "It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment. Our American heirs may find it incredible, as most foreigners do right now, that a nation would want to enforce as a law something which sounds more like a dream, which reads as follows: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." How could a nation with such a law raise its children in an atmosphere of decency? It couldn't--it can't. So the law will surely be repealed soon for the sake of children." literary-freedom literature writing freedom-of-the-press first-amendment constitution free-speech writers Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
627c7b3 Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription. literature life Jeanette Winterson
210ee78 Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun. time literature jeanette-winterson Jeanette Winterson
9954a8e Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy? literature jeanette-winterson Jeanette Winterson
477bbf3 But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory? literature jeanette-winterson Jeanette Winterson
399c8fe I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book. literature contemplation Richard Wright
64a7b81 I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. literature james-baldwin James Baldwin
d0b5861 And now the bride begins to move. Little mechanical doll, clinging to her husband's arm, climbing into the carriage. Her white silk stocking, her elegant shoe. literature fiction Anne Hébert
b36fafc A book did not qualify as literature unless it had polysyllabic words and incomprehensible passages. literature Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
3fff5bc "A book is a beautiful, paper mausoleum, or tomb, in which to store ideas... to keep the bones of your thoughts in one place, for all time. I just want to say - "Hello. We can hear you. The words survived." words literature books fame Caitlin Moran
07ddba8 "A book is a beautiful, paper mausoleum, or tomb, in which to store ideas... to keep the bones of your thoughts in one place, for all time I just want to say - "Hello. We can hear you. The words survived." words literature books fame Caitlin Moran
652748d "Only six books from the age of the Roadmakers were known to exist: The Odyssey; Brave New World; The Brothers Karamazov; The Collected Short Stories of Washington Irving; Eliot Klein's book of puzzles and logic. Beats Me; and Goethe's Faust. They also had substantial sections of The Oxford Companion to World Literature and several plays by Bernard Shaw. There were bits and pieces of other material. Of Mark Twain, two fragments remained, the first half of "The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract," and chapter sixteen from Life on the Mississippi, which describes piloting and racing steamboats, although the precise nature of the steamboat tantalizingly eluded Illyria's best scholars." literature lost-civilizations Jack McDevitt
5d338f9 [Fitzgerald's] latter work represents essentially best qualities of chivalry and decency now too often lacking in the English themselves. literature inspirational fscottfitzgerald malcolmlowry scottfitzgerald decency Malcolm Lowry
a07e78a I steal a glance when no one is looking. Especially at his neck, when he turns to say something to my mother. That slender neck, with its air of determination, brisk and bold... literature Anne Hébert
a348895 In the Dictionary 'lumpy jaw' comes just before 'lunacy,' but in life there are no such clues. Suddenly, for no reason, you might start to dribble from the mouth, to howl peevishly at the moon. You might start quoting your mother, out loud and with conviction. You might lose your friends to the most uninspired of deaths. You might one day wake up and find yourself teaching at a community college; there will have been nothing to warn you. You might say things to your students like, There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you. literature midlife-crisis lunacy disappointment Lorrie Moore
ac10e76 There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock. literature fiction peter-and-the-wolf saints-and-strangers gothic Angela Carter
c139406 A union of literary and scientific cultures - there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come ... Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind. literature science science-and-arts childhood Oliver Sacks
c55150d I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course - I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother's front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I had married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature. literature student Mary Karr
7cd0fd5 Vossignoria pertanto creda a me e, come le ho detto gia prima, legga di questi libri e vedra come le bandiscono la malinconia che caso mai avesse e le fanno migliore il carattere se mai l'abbia guasto. Per parte mia le so dire che da quando sono cavaliere errante sono valoroso, garbato, liberale, bennato, magnanimo, cortese, mite, paziente, tollerante di fatiche, di prigionie, d'incantagioni. literature italian chivalry Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
51a22f8 Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them... literature Azar Nafisi
abd302c Vi rendete conto che tutta la grande letteratura - Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Addio alle armi, La lettera scarlatta, Il segno rosso del coraggio, l' Iliade e l' Odissea, Delitto e castigo, la Bibbia e The Charge of the Light Brigade di Tennyson - parla di che fregatura sia la vita degli esseri umani? (Non e liberatorio che qualcuno lo dica chiaro e tondo?) literature life inspirational Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
affead2 "What do you think about America?" "Everyone always smiles so big! Well--most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid." -- literature fiction the-goldfinch literary-fiction Donna Tartt
91cab3a In some way, every creative action disturbs the universe. literature revolution creativity creation E.L. Konigsburg
731a9eb "They sat a few meters apart, speaking very rarely, and there was really only the noise of turning pages (...) Where Hans Hubermann and Erik Vandenburg were ultimately united by music, Max and Liesel were held together by the quiet gathering of words. "Hi, Max." "Hi, Liesel." They would sit and read." literature Markus Zusak
eef77f8 We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention. progress literature death-of-literature stagnant Thomas C. Foster
0e22102 Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's. literature reading reading-life Thomas C. Foster
d3521a9 As a species we are a predominantly intelligent and exploratory animal, and beliefs harnessed to this fact will be the most beneficial for us. A belief in the validity of the acquisition of knowledge and a scientific understanding of the world we live in, the creation and appreciation of aesthetic phenomena in all their many forms, and the broadening and deepening of our range of experiences in day-to-day living, is rapidly becoming the 'religion' of our time. Experience and understanding are our rather abstract god-figures, and ignorance and stupidity will make them angry. Our schools and universities are our religious training centres, our libraries, museums, art galleries, theatres, concert halls and sports arenas are our places of communal worship. At home we worship with our books. newspapers. magazines, radios and television sets. In a sense, we still believe in an after-life, because part of the reward obtained from our creative works is the feeling that, through them, we will 'live on' after we are dead. Like all religions, this one has its dangers, but if we have to have one, and it seems that we do, then it certainly appears to be the one most suitable for the unique biological qualities of our species. Its adoption by an ever-growing majority of the world population can serve as a compensating and reassuring source of optimism to set against the pessimism (...) concerning our immediate future as a surviving species. literature immortality religion science belief Desmond Morris
ad59051 Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards, and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction, Jonathon Swift's is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children's Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not--or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader--the curious reader, the alert reader--to rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned. literature reading Alberto Manguel
96cf23a Aristotle's account of the Katharsis of tragedy was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable. literature philosophy plays Karen Armstrong
fdcb9f6 The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the leading textbook used in elementary school. They were so widely used that sections in them became part of the national language. Theodore Roosevelt, scion of an elite New York family, schooled by private tutors, had been raised on the same textbooks as the children of Ohio farmers, Chicago tradesman, and New England fishermen. If you want to know what constituted being a good American from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, spend a few hours browsing through the sections in the McGuffey Readers. literature education heritage Charles Murray
a1572e4 When you're young--when I was young--you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. literature youth reality life passionate the-sense-of-an-ending julian-barnes emotions young Julian Barnes
81017db Like the vacationer who returns to a beloved summer house year after year, the addicted reader opens book three or four or eleven in a given series and is thoroughly at home in the locale--its by now familiar native characters, the verbal shrubbery and the narrative floorboards that occasionally creak. literature reading series-books mysteries Selma G. Lanes
1645ee7 Mother made sure her little kids were subjected to a strict routine. We were given a timetable which covered our every waking moment, copies of which were posted by our bedside, in the sitting room and in the kitchen. Story hour meant that mother would read us novels and short stories by Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde and Edmondo de Amicis. Soon we graduated to Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. She read them to us in Chinese and I never realised until much later that the writers wrote them in different European languages. Comics were absolutely forbidden and so were Enid Blyton adventures and pop music. . .Lee Cyn and I soon went to a primary school nearby. . .After mother's rigorous timetable, school became fun and easy-going. literature discipline Ang Swee Chai
6858225 What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events? How much of recollection is invention? Whose invention? literature jeanette-winterson Jeanette Winterson
d0c876e What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself? literature jeanette-winterson Jeanette Winterson
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