literature

Growing up, I loved the tale of Peter Rabbit and also books on Pippi Longstocking. Pippi was a girl who had so much fun and was very daring. My sons loved all the Dr. Seuss books

writing home"here in the wilderness of australiawriting home becomes easyin spite of the spreading wild firesthere is less heat, more certainty.writing home, writing thisi think of those without real homes__ur city, people say, provides houseswhich do not, often, bring one home.

It often is better to ask an ancient Hebrew goatherd, instead of a so-called expert like myself, about the meaning of a particular, biblical story.

The popular culture gives us books that offer entertainment but no ideas. High culture gives us books that offer ideas but no entertainment. The best books manage to do both.

There is no book so bad it does not contain something good.

Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place. And if there is no answer, only literature can point to the impossibility of ever finding one.

Literature is called adabiyat in Islam precisely because it is seen as the keeper of a civilization and the collector of teachings and statements that educate the self and society with adab such that both are elevated to the rank of the cultured man (insan adabi) and society.

Why would a book in which hardly anything happened for most of the time eat at me so much? It was the weirdest thing

People are never satisfied. If they have a little, they want more. If they have a lot, they want still more. Once they have more, they wish they could be happy with little, but are incapable of making the slightest effort in that direction.

Literature, I have always thought, is in most places and companies a singularly dull and uninteresting thing to talk about, but one may, as a rule, hate literary conversation, and yet at the right moment, with all its powers of feeling, the mind in silence may feel what it owes to literature.

So, fuck __m, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We__e GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker__ jackets.

If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it.

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read

I grow weary of the loveThat lasts for a nightWhen it should be thereThe next sunrise

Books have power to bring you glory or doom, it all depends on perception.

Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs