#liter

Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#hemingway #literature

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. ↗

— Tom Waits

#literature #writing #literature

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#literature

I am a lonely man,' Sensei said. 'And so I am glad that you come to see me. But I am also a melancholy man, and so I asked you why you should wish to visit me so often. ↗

— Sōseki Natsume

#japanese #japanese-literature #loneliness #japan

He felt so lost, he said later, that the familiar studio felt like a haunted valley deep in the mountains, with the smell of rotting leaves, the spray of a waterfall, the sour fumes of fruit stashed away by a monkey; even the dim glow of the master's oil lamp on its tripod looked to him like misty moonlight in the hills. ↗

— Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

#japanese #japanese-literature #japan

When you're a kid, getting lost isn't just an event or a situation, it's like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you've done something that can never be undone. ↗

— Ryū Murakami

#japanese #japanese-literature #japan

He invited me to his apartment in the wee hours one morning and pulled out a set of children's building blocks. It seems he used to ride around and around on the Yamanote Line with them, building castles on the floor of the train. ↗

— Ryū Murakami

#japanese #japanese-literature #train #yamanote #japan

Say, you told me you thought Les Miserables was the greatest novel ever written. I think Vanity Fair is the greatest. Let's fight. - Joe Willard ↗

— Maud Hart Lovelace

#flirting #vanity

There is no such thing as a leap into literacy. ↗

— David Petersen

#grammar

The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250] ↗

— Northrop Frye

#poetic-theory #world-culture #mythology