literature

Before I could respond, I looked out the window again and as if in response to my thoughts, I saw Cooper walking up my driveway. My jaw dropped. I peeked around the kitchen doorframe. Mom was still lost to the television. I turned and looked out the window to make sure I wasn__ hallucinating. No, it was really him. And he had a horse walking beside him. How clichéd could it get?

Writers are engineers of human souls.

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature__ killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that__ not the word.

How to explain the sheer tingling joy one experiences when two interesting, complex, and occasionally aggravating characters have at last settled their misunderstandings and will live happily ever after, no matter what travails life might throw in their path, because Jane Austen said they will, and that's that? How to describe the exhilaration of being caught up in an unknown but glamorous world of balls and gowns and rides in open carriages with handsome young men? How to explain that the best part of Jane Austen's world is that sudden recognition that the characters are just like you?

Yet Katie held fast to the dream that perhaps there were men in the world who appreciated good women - men capable of loving a woman enough to die for her.Something had to inspire the heroes in fairy tales and books.Her Aunt Augusta always said it was only womenfolk__ eternal wish for better men that inspired such stories_but Katie liked to believe that living or, at least, once-living men inspired them.

But literature is unique. To understand literature, you read it with your head, but you interpret it with your heart. The two are forced to work together-and, quite frankly, they often don't get along.

I'm sorry,' she said to each of the dead as she unzipped and unfastened their things, 'I'm sorry Courtney. I'm sorry Marcus. I'm sorry Rachel. I'm sorry Jon. I'm sorry I'm alive and you're dead. I'm sorry I was asleep. I'm sorry I didn't save you and now I'm taking your things. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

All literature and popular art contain themes that resonate with the audience.

Most people are afflicted with an inability to say what they see or think. They say there__ nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it is necessary to use the unliterary hand, twirling it in a steadily upward direction, so that human eyes will perceive the abstract figure immanent in wire spring and a certain type of staircase. But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral; it__ a circle that rises without ever closing. I realize that most people would never dare to define it this way, for they suppose that defining is to say what others want us to say rather than what__ required for the definition. I__l say it more accurately: a spiral is a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completing itself. But no, the definition is still abstract. I__l resort to the concrete, and all will become clear: a spiral is a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing. All literature is an attempt to make life real. All of us know, even when we act on what we don__ know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary. Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not __ feel like crying_, which is what an adult, i.e., an idiot, would say but rather, _ I feel like tears._ And this phrase -so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it - decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. __ feel like tears_! The small child aptly defined his spiral. To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming- like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

A rural Venus, Selah rises from thegold foliage of the Sixhiboux River, sweepspetals of water from her skin. At once,clouds begin to sob for such beauty.Clothing drops like leaves."No one makes poetry,my Mme.Butterfly, my Carmen, in Whylah,__ whisper. She smiles: __e__l shape it withour souls.__esire illuminates the dark manuscriptof our skin with beetles and butterflies.After the lightning and rain has ceased,after the lightning and rain of lovemakinghas ceased, Selah will dive again into thesunflower-open river.

Already the people murmur that I am your enemybecause they say that in verse I give the world your me.They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos.Who rises in my verses is not your voice. It is my voicebecause you are the dressing and the essence is me;and the most profound abyss is spread between us.You are the cold doll of social lies,and me, the virile starburst of the human truth.You, honey of courtesan hypocrisies; not me;in all my poems I undress my heart.You are like your world, selfish; not mewho gambles everything betting on what I am.You are only the ponderous lady very lady;not me; I am life, strength, woman.You belong to your husband, your master; not me;I belong to nobody, or all, because to all, to allI give myself in my clean feeling and in my thought.You curl your hair and paint yourself; not me;the wind curls my hair, the sun paints me.You are a housewife, resigned, submissive,tied to the prejudices of men; not me;unbridled, I am a runaway Rocinantesnorting horizons of God's justice.You in yourself have no say; everyone governs you;your husband, your parents, your family,the priest, the dressmaker, the theatre, the dance hall,the auto, the fine furnishings, the feast, champagne,heaven and hell, and the social, "what will they say."Not in me, in me only my heart governs,only my thought; who governs in me is me.You, flower of aristocracy; and me, flower of the people.You in you have everything and you owe it to everyone,while me, my nothing I owe to nobody.You nailed to the static ancestral dividend,and me, a one in the numerical social divider,we are the duel to death who fatally approaches.When the multitudes run riotingleaving behind ashes of burned injustices,and with the torch of the seven virtues,the multitudes run after the seven sins, against you and against everything unjust and inhuman,I will be in their midst with the torch in my hand.

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

Snatch religion back from the clerics and literature from the critics.

Any connoisseur knows you've got to be drunk to really enjoy a good romance.

Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all. - From "Pageturner" in 365 Tomorrows

It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free.

Take my books away, and I should be desperate!

I had never kissed a boy, had never even considered that I might enjoy such an unclean thing, until literature opened my eyes.