literature

Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same bolt of cloth and in the church pew standing six across they looked like a strip of gaudy wallpaper cut into those linked dolls madfolk pass their time in fashioning.

I am no longer a writer. Just an emotion. An emotion that is unable to stay within its own body, and is therefore, trying to make its way into yours.

To become a 'good reader' one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but may spend two or three years on one book [. . .], read only portions of another, devour a third at a single sitting.

Her works are said to be too far from reality to be considered real literature. __hy doesn__ she write about life?_ the people of Rabbit Back ask.

It__ a powerful moment, when you discover a vocabulary exists for something you__ thought incommunicably unique. Personally, I felt it reading Joseph Conrad__ __ord Jim._ I have friends who__e found themselves described in everything from science fiction to detective novels. This self-recognition through others is not simply a by-product of art _ it__ the whole point.

Evidently, I'd suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.

I wished I hadn__ majored in women filling their pockets with stones and sticking their heads into ovens. Maybe tomorrow the pinhole would widen and I would want to be a marine biologist.

. . . Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.

{...} It is hieroglyphic that will last, not stone heads. The future belongs to the word, not the image.(The mason Mutsose, in Achet-Aten).

When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing--maybe one of the best things about literature. It's always an adventure of some kind.

everything that is scatteredcomes together in wordseverything that is lostcomes back in poetry.

Don't you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you've surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him up in a few moments in quick little mouthfuls and leave only a perfectly clean skeleton behind? So, that's the way they're constituted. 'Do you want a clean life, like everyone else?' Of course the answer is yes. How could you not? 'Fine. We'll clean you up. Here's a job, here's a family, here's some organized leisure.' And the little teeth bite into the flesh, right down to the bone. But i'm being unfair. I shouldn't have said, 'the way they're constituted', because after all, it's our way, too: it's a case of who strips whom.

This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being.

Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations__hat we are more than ourselves; that we have souls.

Getting my legal situation fixed takes a bit longer than we all thought: twelve years to be exact. Not a big deal. Only most of my life.

I am very careful about who I choose to build memories with. Some of them might last a lifetime.

There were the usual exhortations to purity _ think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form _ exhortations poets don__ have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.

They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood. They rode through a region where iron will not rust nor tin tarnish. The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches of dried hide lay like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless void and they passed lurid and austere the black and desiccated shapes of horses and mules that travelers had stood afoot.