#liter

There is something perfect to be found in the imperfect: the law keeps balance through the juxtaposition of beauty, which gains perfection through nurtured imperfection. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#beauty #dejan-stojanovic #imperfect #imperfection #juxtaposition

What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.' ↗

— James Wolcott

#author #autumn #brought #contender #dan

If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to-- Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?" They had reached the end of the gallery, and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room. ↗

— Jane Austen

#literature #northanger-abbe #age

I collaborated on most of my dance numbers, literally 50/50, with the choreographers I worked with. ↗

— Jessie Matthews

#dance #i #literally #most #numbers

A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage. ↗

— Robert McNamara

#any #computer #does #judgment #literacy

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting. ↗

— Michael Ondaatje

#toronto #toronto-literature #imagination

For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living. ↗

— Edith Grossman Why Translation Matters

#literature-in-translation #imagination

Although there is a very large literature, still growing almost daily, on the Chinese calendar, its interest is, we suggest, much more archaeological and historical than scientific. ↗

— Joseph Needham

#although #archaeological #calendar #chinese #daily

If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep. (Puritans will object to the language in that sentence, and feminists to the organ, and neither will admire or even notice how it was phrased.) ↗

— William H. Gass

#art

Mr. Darwin contributes some striking and ingenious instances of the way in which the principle partially affects the chain, or rather network of life, even to the total obliteration of certain meshes. ↗

— Richard Owen

#certain #chain #contributes #darwin #even