#era

It was a privileged existence, but also a cage, beautifully decorated, but locked tight always. ↗

— Amber Newberry

#gothic-romance #beauty

I could not bring myself to hang up the phone or even so much as move it from my ear. The chance that I could hear his voice once again was too great a prospect. ↗

— Jasmine Dubroff

#beauty-in-itself-part-one #jasmine-dubroff #love #mera #soul-mates

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

The Beats and the Pranksters showed us different ways of opting out of society. They were both the personification of countercultural movements. The Beats were trying to change literature, and the Pranksters were trying to change the people and the country. Kesey, in fact, was his own cultural revolution, striving to keep the upbeat, freedom-loving spirit of America alive. ↗

— Sterling Lord

#beat-poetry #ken-kesey #pranksters #change

Stories are masks of God. That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm. Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth. Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God. So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them. ↗

— Melanie Tem

#buddha #children #god #jesus #joseph-campbell

White as ash, her face, but ashes hold the phantoms of fires. ↗

— Esther M. Friesner

#beauty

I hadn't understood funeral pyres before, but now I do. It's ghastly to burn someone you love but watching the smoke going into the sky, I think that's rather beautiful now. And I wish Tess could be up in the sky. Somewhere with color and light and air. ↗

— Rosamund Lupton

#funeral #beauty

Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober and consequently ugly-looking ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#moderation #philosophy #ugly #beauty

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. ↗

— Barbara Tuchman

#carriers #civilization #crippled #dumb #history

Friend who has fired the kingfishers and flamed the dragonflies – they catch your light however they move and beam it out of their eyes. ↗

— Bryana Johnson

#christ #free-verse #gerard-manley-hopkins #poetry #the-image