literature

You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.

If you're going to be a narcissistic schmuck, kid, don't bother studying Faulkner. Go straight to Brett Easton Ellis. He's the role model you need.

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one__ life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

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.

Do not speak unflatteringly of Jane," Flora said, walking beside Chad. "She is the greatest writer to have ever lived." "I thought that was Shakespeare." "William was, or course, quite good," Flora said. "But no one can compare to Jane Austen.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author__ sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank__ illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two favourites he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit.But presently he wondered if this spirit were not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. __ have often thought_, he said to himself, __hat there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake._ He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep. He woke two or three times in the night, an unusual occurrence, but he was glad of it, for each time he had been dreaming horribly of these blameless Victorian works_It turned out to be the Boy__ Gulliver__ Travels that Granny had given him, and Dicky had at last to explain his rage with the devil who wrote it to show that men were worse than beasts and the human race a washout. A boy who never had good school reports had no right to be so morbidly sensitive as to penetrate to the underlying cynicism of Swift__ delightful fable, and that moreover in the bright and carefully expurgated edition they bring out nowadays. Mr Corbett could not say he had ever noticed the cynicism himself, though he knew from the critical books it must be there, and with some annoyance he advised his son to take out a nice bright modern boy__ adventure story that could not depress anybody. Mr Corbett soon found that he too was __ff reading_. Every new book seemed to him weak, tasteless and insipid; while his old and familiar books were depressing or even, in some obscure way, disgusting. Authors must all be filthy-minded; they probably wrote what they dared not express in their lives. Stevenson had said that literature was a morbid secretion; he read Stevenson again to discover his peculiar morbidity, and detected in his essays a self-pity masquerading as courage, and in Treasure Island an invalid__ sickly attraction to brutality. This gave him a zest to find out what he disliked so much, and his taste for reading revived as he explored with relish the hidden infirmities of minds that had been valued by fools as great and noble. He saw Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as two unpleasant examples of spinsterhood; the one as a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else__ flirtations, the other as a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions. He compared Wordsworth__ love of nature to the monstrous egoism of an ancient bellwether, isolated from the flock.

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

From one bell all the bells toll.

Had Stella been named anything else, and/or had we lived in any other city besides New Orleans, my desperate call would have been just my desperate call. In that alternate universe the neighbors might have peeked from behind the curtains but they wouldn't have laughed or, worse, joined in. But you simply cannot shout the name Stella while standing under a window in New Orleans and hope for anything like an authentic or even mildly earnest moment. Literature had beaten me to this moment, had staked its flag here first, and there was nothing I could do outside in that soupy, rain-drenched alleyway that could rise above sad parody. Perhaps if she'd been named Beatrice, or Katarzyna-maybe then my life would have turned out differently. Maybe then my voice would have roused her to the window, maybe then I could have told her that I was sorry, that I could be a better man, that I couldn't promise I knew everything it meant but I loved her. Instead I stared up at that black window, shutmouthed and impotent, blinking and reblinking my eyes to flush out the rainwater. "Stella," I whispered. The French have an expression: "Without literature life is hell." Yeah, well. Life with it bears its own set of flames.

literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people.

This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man__-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life.

Writing poetry is a state of free float

In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape from blame...

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former.

In literature, you either create a classical or create a foam! There is no in between!

Human existence is temporary and all the knowledge of the universe we acquire will in time be forgotten because there will be no humans left to benefit from any of the stuff we learned.And yet, this doesn't invalidate scientific exploration to me. We seek to understand the universe because it makes our lives better and more rich. Similarly, we tell stories (and think about why and how to tell stories) because it makes human existence richer. Made-up stories matter. They bring us pleasure and solace and nurture empathy by letting us see the world through others' eyes. They also help us to feel unalone, to understand that our grief and joy is shared not just by those around us but by all those who came before us and all those still yet to come.

Writing, painting, singing--it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death's footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives.