#era

...perhaps, when it got utterly dark, the peace of the darkness would become the same as light so that my last experience would become as mysterious and musical as my first, so that in my last darkness there might not be the same need of understanding anything so far away as the world anymore. ↗

— Derek Raymond

#depression #desperation #meaning #death

Human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#independence #liberation #liberty #women #freedom

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is a live and not after he is dead. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#the-great-gasby #friendship

Too many critics mistake the deliberations of the Congress for its decisions. ↗

— Sam Rayburn

#critics #decisions #deliberations #many #mistake

I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. ↗

— Emily Brontë

#dreams #fiction #literature #change

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself. ↗

— Peter Ackroyd

#literature #music #imagination

Tutt'intorno a noi scorreva la città di Roma, splendida nella sua indifferenza, eternamente sicura di sé, felice di prendersi i nostri soldi e posare per una foto, ma senza avere alla fin fine bisogno di niente e di nessuno. ↗

— Gary Shteyngart

#città #italia #italy #lazio #roma

What on earth did you say to Isola? She stopped in on her way to pick up Pride and Prejudice and to berate me for never telling her about Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Why hadn't she known there were better love stories around? Stories not riddled with ill-adjusted men, anguish, death and graveyards! ↗

— Mary Ann Shaffer

#leading-men #literature #pride-and-prejudice #romance #death

I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that George Orwell, in his second novel, A Clergyman's Daughter , published in 1935, had borrowed from Joyce for his nighttime scene in Trafalgar Square, where Deafie and Charlie and Snouter and Mr. Tallboys and The Kike and Mrs. Bendigo and the rest of the bums and losers keep up a barrage of song snatches, fractured prayers, curses, and crackpot reminiscences. But only on my most recent reading of Ulysses did I discover, in the middle of the long and intricate mock-Shakespeare scene at the National Library, the line 'Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's daughter.' So now I think Orwell quarried his title from there, too. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#george-orwell #influence #james-joyce #literary-criticism #literature

In this era in which we live, the old-fashioned virtues grow increasingly unpopular. ↗

— B. Carroll Reece

#grow #increasingly #live #old-fashioned #unpopular