#class

Do you think me, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#inspirational #social-class #courage

This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man’s-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life. ↗

— John Buchan

#literature #change

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise. ↗

— Leland Ryken

#classics #fiction #literature #novels #on-fiction

Then said he, ’I am going to my Father’s; and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles who now will be my rewarder.’.... So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side. ↗

— John Bunyan

#classics #literature #courage

You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward! ↗

— Homer

#cowardice #death #greece #war #death

…but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives. ↗

— Homer

#death #greece #death

There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#fiction #marlow #death

The worst, the very worst requirement of friendship, in Eve Dallas's opinion, was sitting through an entire evening of childbirth classes. What went on there--the sights, the sounds, the assault on all the senses--turned the blood cold. ↗

— J.D. Robb

#eve-dallas #death

But now, as it is, sorrows, unending sorrows must surge within your heart as well—for your own son’s death. Never again will you embrace him stiding home. My spirit rebels—I’ve lost the will to live, to take my stand in the world of men— ↗

— Homer

#death #greece #sorrow #death

And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself—more birds than women flocking round his body! ↗

— Homer

#death #greece #grief #mourning #death