#authority

Reading a book is like having the ability to dip a straw into the author’s soul and sip and slurp without lowering the water table of wisdom.
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— Jarod Kintz

#books #reading #soul #wisdom #authority

Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means. ↗

— Billy Collins

#authority

The nail that sticks out farthest gets hammered the hardest. ↗

— Patrick Jones

#different #metaphor #rebels #wisdom #authority

Being an author, is being a dictator. (in a good way) ↗

— Pseudonymous Bosch

#authority

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#authority

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#authority

When you read, don't just consider what the author thinks, consider what you think ↗

— Tom Schulman

#john-keating #tom-schulman #authority

The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own. ↗

— Benjamin Disraeli

#authority

I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#contrarianism #dissent #dissidents #free-thought #harold-rosenberg

And you are going to close the gates, because I told you to close the gates. ↗

— Hilari Bell

#funny #jiaan #funny