literature

Anybody gets to ask questions about any fiction-related issues she wants. No question about literature is stupid. You are forbidden to keep yourself from asking a question or making a comment because you fear it will sound obvious or unsophisticated or lame or stupid. Because critical reading and prose fiction are such hard, weird things to try to study, a stupid-seeming comment or question can end up being valuable or even profound. I am deadly-serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machines-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other student's in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.. . . This does not mean we all have to sit around smiling sweetly at one another for three hours a week. No truths about the form, content, structure, symbolism, theme, or overall artistic quality of any piece of fiction are etched in stone or beyond dispute.

The night I sat down to read Dostoievski for the first time was a most important event in my life, even more important than my first love. It was the first deliberate, conscious act which had significance for me; it changed the whole face of the world. Whether it is true that the clock stopped that moment when I looked up after the first deep gulp I don't know any more. But the world stopped dead for a moment, that I know. It was my first glimpse into the soul of a man, or shall I say simply that Dostoievski was the first man to reveal his soul to me?"Henry Miller

The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.

Much, maybe too much, has been written about literature. (I know better than anyone; I__ an expert in the field). Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define. Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, it limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave__ more direct, more complete, deeper access than you__ have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak so openly as when we face a blank page and address an unknown reader.

An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction.

And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid and more abiding than those which come to us in sleep, why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which only we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slow course of their development prevents us from perceiving them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.

_ I__ going to be a writer, he reminded Milo._ And you won__ need literature?_ I__l write my own.

Decades after little Colleen__ death, my sister Kathy still loves her daughter dearly. Colleen was born with cerebral palsy. She died in Kath__ arms in a rocking chair at the age of six. They were listening to a music box that looked very much like a smiling pink bunny.The opening quote in this book, __ will love you forever, but I__l only miss you for the rest of my life,_ is from Kath__ nightly prayers to her child.Colleen couldn__ really talk or walk very well, but loved untying my mother__ tennis shoes and then laughing. When Mom died decades later we sent her off in tennis shoes so Colleen would have something to untie in Heaven.In the meantime, Dad had probably been taking really good care of her up there. He must have been aching to hug her for all of her six years on earth.Mom__ spirit comes back to play with great grandchildren she__ never met or had a chance to love while she was still _ I almost said __mong the living._ In my family, though, the dead don__ always stay that way. You can be among the living without technically being alive. Mom comes back to play, but Dad shows up only in emergencies. They are both watching over their loved ones.__he Mourning After_ is dedicated to all those we have had the joy of loving before they__e slipped away to the other side.It then celebrates the joy of re-unions.

What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other.

If we didn't read people who were bastards, we'd never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

And I, a twister, love, what I abhor.

Give at least fifteen minutes everyday to reading. Sometimes, we spend a lot of time watching television - surfing through channels; not really watching anything in particular. Fifteen minutes out of that time is not a big deal. Soon you will find yourself reading for more than fifteen minutes. Soon you will find yourself turning to a book when you need to relax. Soon you will realize that reading a book heals you in a way you never imagined possible.

If you want to take pictures of Chinese food, you have to taste real Chinese food. The flavors soak into your tongue, go into your stomach. The stomach is where your true feelings are. And if you take photos, these true feelings from your stomach can come out, so that everyone can taste the food just by looking at your pictures.

Maybe its because i rejoice over what i have and don't grieve over what i don't have".

InsomniaI wonderIf those talks matterFew done in the clarity of dayOr the manyDone at 3 a.m. in the morning

A book did not qualify as literature unless it had polysyllabic words and incomprehensible passages.

Literature is a vast ocean, in which one has to drown themselves to be able to conquer it. Those on shore can see a side of it or have tasted a part of it. And I choose to drown myself in it than just to see it.