#liter

Kill me, or you are a murderer. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#literature #death

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#death #literature #reading #words #death

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#library #literature #reading #words #death

How curious it was, [...], that we humans had taken millions of year to crawl up out of the swamps and yet, within minutes of death, we were already tobogganing back down the slope. ↗

— Alan Bradley

#philosophical #death

Her constant orders for beheading are shocking to those modern critics of children's literature who feel that juvenile fiction should be free of all violence and especially violence with Freudian undertones. Even the Oz books of L. Frank Baum, so singularly free of the horrors to be found in Grimm and Andersen, contain many scenes of decapitation. As far as I know, there have been no empirical studies of how children react to such scenes and what harm if any is done to their psyche. My guess is that the normal child finds it all very amusing and is not damaged in the least, but that books like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis. ↗

— Martin Gardner

#children #death #literature #media #reading

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us. ↗

— Katharine Fullerton Gerould

#among #comes #conventional #kind #literacy

I have a really difficult time watching myself on film. I literally cower in my seat and cover my face. ↗

— Brooklyn Decker

#difficult #difficult time #face #film #i

Is this your first case?' This from the ugliest person Winter had ever seen. His face resembled five pounds of meat loaf molded by an arthritic potter. ↗

— Åke Edwardson

#scandinavian-literature #death

Magistrate: May I die a thousand deaths ere I obey one who wears a veil! Lysistrata: If that's all that troubles you, here take my veil, wrap it round your head, and hold your tounge. Then take this basket; put on a girdle, card wool, munch beans. The War shall be women's business. ↗

— Aristophanes

#feminism #gender-roles #greek-literature #pacifism #war

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design." "You say this as if you envied him." "There are worse prisons than words. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#escape #literature #pain #prison #reading