#lit

His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political. ↗

— Iain Pears

#laziness #occupation #occupied-france #politics #war

Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely. ↗

— Iain Pears

#cloud-cuckoo-land #desires #dreams #futility #imagination

Pearl introduces an original story, in a form which was to become one of the most frequent in mediaeval literature, the dream-vision. Authors like Chaucer and Langland use this form, in which the narrator describes another world - usually a heavenly paradise - which is compared with the earthly human world. In Pearl, the narrator sees his daughter who died in infancy, 'the ground of all my bliss'. She now has a kind of perfect knowledge, which her father can never comprehend. The whole poem underlines the divide between human comprehension and perfection; these lines show the gap between possible perfection and fallen humanity which, thematically, anticipate many literary examinations of man's fall, the most well known being Milton's late Renaissance epic, Paradise Lost. ↗

— Ronald Carter

#dreams

There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it. ↗

— Mitch Glazer

#reality #storytelling #child

How deep congenital sex-inversion roots may be gathered from the fact that the pleasure-dream of the male Urning has to do with male persons, and of the female with females. ↗

— Richard von Krafft-Ebing

#gay-men #homosexuality #lesbians #nocturnal-emissions #dreams

Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? ↗

— William Wordsworth

#dreams

One thing is clear: The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens would pay nearly half of everything they earn to the government. ↗

— Ron Paul

#founding-fathers #illegal-taxes #income-tax #politics #ron-paul

Politics bores you?" Bronsen said. Julien smiled. "It does. Apologies, sir, and it is not that I haven't tried to be fascinated. But careful and meticulous research has suggested the hypothesis that all politicians are liars, fools, and tricksters, and I have as yet come across no evidence to the contrary. They can do great damage, and rarely any good. It is the job of the sensible man to try and protect civilization from their depradations. ↗

— Iain Pears

#damage #deceit #depradation #lies #politicians

Each of us has immense potential to achieve what we desire, unless we enliven and enlighten our life with inspiration, bring our dreams or desires into reality we will never shine as bright as our potential. ↗

— Steven Redhead

#desire #desires #dreams #enlighten #enliven

Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction. ↗

— Walter Moers

#reading #dreams