literature

We create words, words create wonders.

Literary art's sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that do not decay and die. This socially and economically worthless experience is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank, on that. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read.

You are my shaper and my world as well. It is done. No need to choose.

I don't write poems to melt your heart.I write them,so our heartscan melt together.

It was. It will never be again. Remember.

It's a truth universally acknowledged...

I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author.

Which is probably one of the reasons those of us who love contemporary fiction love it as we do. We__e alone with it. It arrives without references, without credentials we can trust. Givers of prizes (not to mention critics) do the best they can, but they may__hey probably will__e scoffed at by their children__ children. We, the living readers, whether or not we__e members of juries, decide, all on our own, if we suspect ourselves to be in the presence of greatness. We__e compelled to let future generations make the more final decisions, which will, in all likelihood, seem to them so clear as to produce a sense of bafflement over what was valued by their ancestors; what was garlanded and paraded, what carried to the temple on the shoulders of the wise.

Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe.

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.

Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events.

Poetry, Shakespeare and opera, are like mumps and should be caught when young. In the unhappy event that there is a postponement to mature years, the results may be devastating.

In the dream, Tana's mother loved her more than anyone or anything. More than death.

Reading is a time machine that allows you to acquire wisdom from the past and to analyze and imagine another person__ vision of the future.

I wish I__ known those words on the day I watched those German troops land, plane-load after plane-load of them__nd come off ships down in the harbor! All I could think of was damn them, damn them, over and over. If I could have thought the words "the bright day is done and we are for the dark," I__ have been consoled somehow and ready to go out and contend with circumstance__nstead of my heart sinking to my shoes.

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

Literature is the aesthetic exploitation of language