#liter

Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other ↗

— Anton Chekhov

#medicine #medicine

She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman. ↗

— David Mitchell

#wit #women #appreciation

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#literature

Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here. ↗

— Chaim Potok

#life

Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Her ashes new-create another heir As great in admiration as herself. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#drama #english-literature #drama

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#death #literary-tradition #truth #beauty

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village. ↗

— Roald Dahl

#literature #reading #words #travel

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#literature #reading #travel

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#literacy #reading #person

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#england #homophobia #homosexuality #lgbt-literature #maurice-novel