#liter

Writing, painting, singing--it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death's footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives. ↗

— Ally Condie

#death-and-dying #literature #literature-writing #art

Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons. ↗

— Roman Payne

#cash #credit-cards #digital-age #gold #literary-style

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#african #african-authors #african-literature #literary-fiction #literary-quotes

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past. ↗

— Andrzej Wajda

#anchors #consequently #in the past #know #language

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write? ↗

— Gao Xingjian

#authors #continued #could #enduring #great

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting. ↗

— Michael Ondaatje

#toronto #toronto-literature #imagination

For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living. ↗

— Edith Grossman Why Translation Matters

#literature-in-translation #imagination

That was always my fear, that perhaps books would lead me astray, teaching me about a life that didn’t match reality. ↗

— Stefanos Livos

#imagination #literature #reality #stories #teach

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while. ↗

— W.B. Yeats

#hope #literature #memory #poetry #art

If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep. (Puritans will object to the language in that sentence, and feminists to the organ, and neither will admire or even notice how it was phrased.) ↗

— William H. Gass

#art