#ding

We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first. ↗

— Marcus Aurelius

#knowledge #understanding #death

Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#books #education #enlightenment #light #literacy

Was I being groomed for some special mission? What possible purpose could an existence like mine serve? When I wasn’t drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me. ↗

— Heather King

#sobriety #solitude #design

Fiction is life by design. ↗

— Mary Kittredge

#design

A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin. ↗

— Victor J. Banis

#reading #writing #dreams

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book. ↗

— Stéphane Mallarmé

#reading #world

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#reading #feeling

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#english #literature #reading #teachers #beauty

the underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us... ↗

— Barack Obama

#cruelty #homosexuality #politics #religion #respect

Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#fairytales #stories #dreams