books

Literature is impossible, in exactly this sense: every new generation has so much 'catching up' to do that the real choice that presents itself soon is the following one: one either spends ones entire life just reading all the classics, or one pretends to be 'contemporary and hip' and never reads any of the classics because in order to pretend to be contemporary one has to at least superficially read the works of contemporaries. Hence the dilemma: one either does not care about being fashionable, or one is fashionable and just learns to mimic some knowledge about the classics. As time develops this rift just becomes bigger, because the amount of books written grows and grows to insane proportions. Conclusion: one can only be hip in the future if one does not read at all, which is a phenomenon I am already witnessing in the media.

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.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently

Reading is an intimate act, perhaps more intimate than any other human act. I say that because of the prolonged (or intense) exposure of one mind to another.

Technically, you cannot really own a book you bought; you can only own the sheets of paper your copy is printed on; unless, of course, you are the book__ publisher.

Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.

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__elt akin to an instance of religious grace.

I want all the books on the she

Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison; they sang of the variety and richness of life, of man__ audacity in his strivings towards goodness and beauty.

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind__ eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own _ a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

Literature is life.

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.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses.-James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz

But now books and men had gone their separate ways. Who has the patience for a book? Only a book.

In literature, the reader standing at the threshold of the end of a book harbors no illusion that the end has not come__e or she can see where it finishes, the abyss the other side of the last chunk of text. Which means that the writer is never in danger of ending too soon__r if he does the reader has been so forewarned. This is the advantage a book has over a film__t is the brain that marshals forward the text and controls the precise moment of conclusion of the book, as the density of the pages thins. A film can end without you if you__e fallen asleep or, because you can__ wait any longer to use the bathroom, slipped out of the darkness of the theatre salon, and missed it. There will never be a form more perfect than the book, which always moves at your pace, that sits waiting for you exactly where you__e left it and never goes on without you.

Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

The core _ and perhaps unexpected _ thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns _ and in this sense simplify.

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.