literature

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is color that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instrumentsproducing a confused agreeable massof sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.

It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.

Propping up a seat at the bar we devour chicken wings like life does dreams

I've always felt that the performance of a raag resembles a novel - or at least the kind of novel I'm attempting to write. You know,' he continued, extemporizing as he went along, 'first you take one note and explore it for a while, then another to discover its possibilities, then perhaps you get to the dominant, and pause for a bit, and it's only gradually that the phrases begin to form and the tabla joins in with the beat...and then the more brilliant improvisations and diversions begin, with the main theme returning from time to time, and finally it all speeds up, and the excitement increases to a climax.

Elgin himself looked ten years younger, now that he__ 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__ very original, no doubt, but not for a hot evening. What I need is some trollop."I couldn__ believe my ears, and him a church-goer, too. "Well, my lord, I dunno,_ says I. "Tientsin ain__ much of a place, but I__l see what I can drum up _""Michel__ 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 wasn__ intended to be about perfect people, it was about flaws, very real and very deep human flaws.

People perish. Books are immortal.

Written words, if carefully laid down, represent the civilized ideal of reason.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night.

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

I don't fear death--I fear dying before I've read Dickens end to end.

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.

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)

Families start out, most of the time, with unconditional acceptance of one another. That acceptance starts in childhood and continues into adulthood. Somewhere in there, between childhood and adulthood, the ability to distinguish right versus wrong is born.

Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, trowing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.

The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.