#liter

Unfortunately, these days, 'literary' writing seems to have become synonymous with 'showy' writing, writing that is beautiful but doesn't tell a story. This is a misguided trend. If today's 'literary' writers would look back only one or two hundred years at real literary writers like Dostoyevsky, Poe, Conrad, Melville, they would find momentous stories--not just pretty writing--at the core of almost all of their great works. ↗

— Noah Lukeman

#literary-writing #pretty-writing #beauty

The critic's aim should be to interpret the work they are writing about and help readers appreciate it, by defining and analysing those qualities that make it precious and by indicating the angle of visions from which its beauties are visible. But many critics do not realize their function. They aim not to appreciate, but to judge; they seek first to draw lines about literature and then bully readers into accepting these laws. ↗

— David Cecil

#literary-criticism #beauty

Words are a puzzle; put them together the right way and you get something beautiful. ↗

— Amy Joy

#wordsmithing #writing #beauty

People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book. ↗

— Malcolm X

#inspirational #literacy #religious #change

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#literature #reading #beauty

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this for half an hour. It will be a change. ↗

— Jerome K. Jerome

#literary-criticism #change

Literature simply becomes richer after you've been fired, rejected, stranded, or had to change a few midnight diapers. ↗

— Christian Bauman

#books #literature #change

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it. ↗

— William Carlos Williams

#change

Science has discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: 'all meanings depend on the key of interpretation.' What makes us human, and what makes each of us his or her own human, is not simply the genes that we have buried into our base pairs, but how our cells, in dialogue with our environment, feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves. Life is a dialectic. ↗

— Jonah Lehrer

#genes #genome #life #literature #science

It was like dawn, and then dusk cascading over the Himalayas. First, the gradual brightening over snow and contour, then the shining, sparkling sun mirrored; and then as the moment of joy passed – the lingering colour-changing light; reluctant to leave. That faint, bittersweet almost-light, and then indigo outlines and inky black. ↗

— Radhika Mukherjee

#beauty-in-literature #inspirational #our-particular-shadows #promise #radhika-mukherjee