#liter

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

Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#literature #nadine-gordimer #writing #death

Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too. ↗

— Walter Kaufmann

#religious #communication

I grew up in a very literate, very independent household where people spoke their ideas and were very supportive of helping each other find their own way. ↗

— Lucinda Williams

#find #grew #helping #household #i

But since Catt was more realist than fabulist, she understood her actual death at the hands of her killer would be something much slower. It would be a classical feminine death, like a marriage…Raised by meek working-class parents, she despised petty groveling and had no talent for making shit up. She wanted to be a “real” intellectual moving with dizzying freedom between high and low points in the culture. And to a certain extent, she’d succeeded. Catt’s semi-name attracted a following among Asberger’s boys, girls who’d been hospitalized for mental illness, sex workers, Ivy alumnae on meth, and always, the cutters. With her small self-made fortune, Catt saw herself as Moll Flanders, out-sourcing her visiting professorships and writing commissions to younger artists whose work she believed in. But she’d reached a point lately where the same young people she’d helped were blogging against her, exposing the ‘cottage industry’ she ran out of her Los Angeles compound facing the Hollywood sign … the same compound these bloggers had lived in rent-free after arriving from Iowa City, Alberta, New Zealand. Loathing all institutions, Catt had become one herself. Even her dentist asked her for money. ↗

— Chris Kraus

#death

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

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