#liter

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his hip, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford. ↗

— Elizabeth Gaskell

#humor #literature #men #ownership #people

There's something in your eyes that scares me," Max whispired, looking through the window. Landon took her face into his hand and made her look into his eyes "What?" he asked. "What do you see?" "Fear," she answered plainly. "I see fear ↗

— Shawn Kirsten Maravel

#love #shawn-maravel #the-wanderer #love

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them. ↗

— A.S. Byatt

#craft #literature #poetry #self-confidence #skill

For thy sweet love remembr'd such wealth brings That then, I scorn to change my state with kings. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#romance #shakespeare #change

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#leo-tolstoy #literature #russia #change

All the words he'd stored up had tumbled into the great chasm beneath them ↗

— Carey Jane Clark

#inspirational #inspirational

Don't ever let anyone tell you that things can't be changed, that things can't be done. The can and they will, if we are united in what we believe. ↗

— F.C. Malby

#literary-fiction #change

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#literature #reading #freedom

this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#literature #writing #propaganda

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. --speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962 ↗

— John Steinbeck

#writing #change