literature

She's right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling.

The stories are not made, they are discovered.

Read the great books, gentlemen,_ Mr. Monte said one day. __ust the great ones. Ignore the others. There__ not enough time.

The most advertised commodity is not always intrinsically the best; but is sometimes merely the product of a company, with plenty of money to spend on advertising.

Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

...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.

We shared a daughter? I'd not thought about it that way before. If we shared a daughter, and something happened to Claire, then I would not have to hare Esther with her anymore. I would have Esther to myself.

The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is unreliable. Today it may be stunning, hypnotic. Tomorrow it may be lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet.

A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.

A writer's mind is a place where demons fight angels in disguise.

Every kingdom has three pillars: Poet, Sword and Law.

She would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose.

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.

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.

I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals _ Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond mines to the floors of today's stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease. If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea.

It hadn__ always been this way, that__ a cliché, but it is a cliché for a reason. It__ not like anyone starts a relationship with nothing to say to the other person. No-one wants to feel like a complete stranger and live together because it__ easier than trying to remember who owns the copy of Almost Famous _ which was mine by the way.