#classics

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

Well that ain’t so. You get babies from each other. But there’s this man, too—he has all these babies just waitin‘ to wake up, he breathes life into ’em…” Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies. He was slowly talking himself to sleep and taking me with him, but in the quietness of his foggy island there rose the faded image of a gray house with sad brown doors. “Dill?” “Mm?” “Why do you reckon Boo Radley’s never run off?” Dill sighed a long sigh and turned away from me. “Maybe he doesn’t have anywhere to run off to… ↗

— Harper Lee

#beauty

There is remedy for all things except death - Don Quixote De La Mancha ↗

— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

#comedy #don-quixote #knighthood #world #death

Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread. ↗

— B.R. Myers

#classics #reading #business

It may occasion surprise that the decree of a temporal power sufficed to give the classics a position that can be compared in other cultures to the place of sacred scriptures inspired by divine revelation. ↗

— Hellmut Wilhelm

#i-ching #occult #change

And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre ↗

— George Orwell

#fiction-novel #philosophical #truth #change

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

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