#liter

I have not been nourished by English Literature. . . for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer... I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh), and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ‘mad’. . . but I don’t believe I am... [I] set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#epic #greek #homer #myth #design

You cannot buy our leaders and then sell that to us as freedom." From my new novel, Beyond Southern Africa. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view... ↗

— Malik Stan Reaves

#african-literature #freedom

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#dreams

I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#reading #dreams

All I want is to sleep--to dream. Life is better in dreams. ↗

— Christina Westover

#dreams #literary-fiction #literary-quotes #poisoning-sylvie #san-francisco

When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future. ↗

— Aberjhani

#dreams #famous-authors #famous-poets #literacy #national-poetry-month

Me? I had no dreams. No longings. Dreams only set you up for disappointment. Plus, you had to have a life to have dreams of a better life. ↗

— Julie Anne Peters

#high-school-kids #lgbtq #lgbtq-literature #luna #transgender

Not thou alone, but all humanity doth in its progress fable emulate. Whence came thy rocket-ships and submarine if not from Nautilus, from Cavorite? Your trustiest companions since the cave, we apparitions guided mankind's tread, our planet, unseen counterpart to thine, as permanent, as ven'rable, as true. On dream's foundation matter's mudyards rest. Two sketching hands, each one the other draws: the fantasies thou've fashioned fashion thee. ↗

— Alan Moore

#dreams

Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don't mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery. ...I hate it because of all the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages, that it snuffs out every year. It is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egotists that survive. ↗

— Brenda Ueland

#literary-criticism #sensitivity #writing #age

The great break of my literary career was going to law school. ↗

— Scott Turow

#career #going #great #law #law school