#liter

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them — are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent. Perhaps the searchers will fail, perhaps it is impossible for the instrument of contemplation to contemplate itself, perhaps if it is possible it means the end of imaginative literature — [...] anyhow—that way lies movement and even combustion for the novel, for if the novelist sees himself differently, he will see his characters differently and a new system of lighting will result. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#imagination #literature #movement #novel #family

While it's true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for? ↗

— Elif Batuman

#tolstoy #unhappiness #family

Unfortunately, I have dedicated great effort to the task of compiling this ‘sensitive words glossary,’ and I have mastered my filtering skills. I knew which words and sentences had to be cut, and I accepted the cutting as if that was the way it should be. In fact, I will often take it on myself to save time and cut a few words. I call this ‘castrated writing’ -—I am a proactive eunuch, I have already castrated myself before the surgeon raises his scalpel. ↗

— Murong Xuecun

#freedom-of-speech #freedom

If religion is true, one must believe. And if one chooses not to believe, one’s choice is marked under the category of a refusal, and is thus never really free: it has the duress of a recoil.” With literary belief, however, “one is always free to choose not to believe.” This, Wood argues, is the freedom of literature; it is what constitutes its “reality. ↗

— James Wood

#literature #quarterly-conversation #religion #freedom

There is much to discover that's not on the back cover! ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#back-covers #book #book-cover #book-cover-quotes #book-covers

London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books. ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#lessons #literary-london #london #meaning #past

The genuine artist, Harris is saying, finds reality in a point of identity between subject and object, a point at which the created world and the world that is really there become the same thing. [p.211] ↗

— Northrop Frye

#literary-theory #poetics #imagination

As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out. ↗

— Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

#japan #japanese #japanese-literature #torture #imagination

The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role. One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other person—which means, moreover, to have non-read the same books. From the beginning of the relationship, then, it is crucial to show that we can match the expectations of our beloved by making him or her sense the proximity of our inner libraries. ↗

— Pierre Bayard

#compatability #imagination #inner-lives #interiority #literature

Don Quixote is not an imaginary person; he is as real as Alexander the Great. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#don-quixote #imaginary #imagination #literature #real