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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #literature
He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down. ↗
#insults #life #literature #novels #poems
One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms. ↗
#realism #russian-author #russian-literature #writers #writing
Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line. ↗
#assembly-line #dejan-stojanovic #final #literature #literature-quotes
En el muro de Facebook hay una opción que te permite añadir "Me gusta" al comentario o la foto de otro internauta. El pictograma es una mano cerrada con el pulgar hacia arriba. También ofrece la posibilidad, en caso de arrepentimiento, de sustituirlo por un "Ya no me gusta". Eso es todo. La red social de Zuckerberg no admite la alternativa de matizar esa adhesión o ese arrepentimiento con algún estado intermedio, quizá titubeante o más gaseoso. Sólo acepta la rotundidad de un sí o un no, del blanco o el negro, con el pulgar hacia arriba o hacia abajo, sin medias tintas. La duda ha sido expulsada de esta arcadia digital y condenada a vagar por el desierto de territorios más lejanos y lentos, es decir, más literarios [...] Ahora bien, pensar consiste justamente en lo contrario. Pensar implica el compromiso radical de ir un paso más allá del "Me gusta" o "No me gusta", de suspender la fase infantil de la imposición caprichosa de nuestros antojos. Aquí no sirve eso tan socorrido del "Porque lo digo yo" y el puñetazo en la mesa. Hay que razonar, justificar, argumentar con palabras de peso nuestro amor, nuestro rechazo, lo cual es complicado e incómodo, ya que puedes equivocarte o quedar en ridículo. O puedes caer en la paradoja de aquel personaje de Monterroso, un escritor cuya esposa, tras desvelar los hábitos de trabajo de él, concluía: «Cuando no se le ocurre nada escribe pensamientos». ↗
One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: 'This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?' I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves. I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religio, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford.... I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary. ↗
Only sweet people with good virtues can go to fairyland. Those who treat others meanly and without respect can never go there. ↗
Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad. ↗
#hangover #humor #literature #humor
Pay attention, and use your imagination. ↗
#on-writing #poetry #r-m-engelhardt #writing-life #imagination
Marx was troubled by the question of why ancient Greek art retained an ‘eternal charm’, even though the social conditions which produced it had long passed; but how do we know that it will remain ‘eternally’ charming, since history has not yet ended? Let us imagine that by dint of some deft archaeological research we discovered a great deal more about what ancient Greek tragedy actually meant to its original audiences, recognized that these concerns were utterly remote from our own, and began to read the plays again in the light of this deepened knowledge. One result might be that we stopped enjoying them. We might come to see that we had enjoyed them previously because we were unwittingly reading them in the light of our own preoccupations; once this became less possible, the drama might cease to speak at all significantly to us. The fact that we always interpret literary works to some extent in the light of our own concerns - indeed that in one sense of ‘our own concerns’ we are incapable of doing anything else - might be one reason why certain works of literature seem to retain their value across the centuries. It may be, of course, that we still share many preoccupations with the work itself; but it may also be that people have not actually been valuing the ‘same’ work at all, even though they may think they have. ‘Our’ Homer is not identical with the Homer of the Middle Ages, nor ‘our’ Shakespeare with that of his contemporaries; it is rather that different historical periods have constructed a ‘different’ Homer and Shakespeare for their own purposes, and found in these texts elements to value or devalue, though not necessarily the same ones. All literary works, in other words, are ‘rewritten’, if only unconsciously, by the societies which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a ‘re-writing’. No work, and no current evaluation of it, can simply be extended to new groups of people without being changed, perhaps almost unrecognizably, in the process; and this is one reason why what counts as literature is a notably unstable affair. ↗
