#literature

Pay attention, and use your imagination. ↗

— R.M. Engelhardt

#on-writing #poetry #r-m-engelhardt #writing-life #imagination

Truth is hard-hearted and unrelenting, too clear, precise; a lie is much more imaginative. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#clear #dejan-stojanovic #hard-hearted #imagination #imaginative

I'm planting a tree to teach me to gather strength from my deepest roots. ↗

— Andrea Koehle Jones

#children-s-books #children-s-literature #roots #strength-of-character #tree-of-life

You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as ROBINSON CRUSOE never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years—generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco—and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad—ROBINSON CRUSOE. When I want advice—ROBINSON CRUSOE. In past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much—ROBINSON CRUSOE. I have worn out six stout ROBINSON CRUSOES with hard work in my service. On my lady's last birthday she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and ROBINSON CRUSOE put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain. ↗

— Wilkie Collins

#life

Life eats life to live. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #eats #life #literature #literature-quotes

I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But, probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clapsed her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: 'Oh, Hermann...." It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#love #love

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#books #literature #reading #literature

And literature frequently rises to heights that make it international. ↗

— Irving Langmuir

#heights #international #literature #make #rises

All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand. ↗

— George Henry Lewes

#defined #imitation #imperfect #insight #literature

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. ↗

— C. S. Lewis

#art #be original #become #been #before