#liter

t this point I would like to return to the question of the plot movement and the different narrative levels of the book. David Lodge raises a crucial issue when he asks 'how Charlotte Brontë created a literary structure in which the domestic and the mythical, the realistic world of social behaviour and the romantic world of passionate self-consciousness, could co-exist with only occasional lapses into incongruity.' As far as the plot and setting go, however, this states the question rather misleadingly, for in fact at Thornfield there begins a progressive plot movement from realism to fantasy. By 'realism' I do not mean the predominance of the every day and commonplace, or an authorial objectivity of treatment, but simply the use of material that the reader can accept as existing in the ordinary world as well, or of events of a kind that might happen in it without being viewed as extraordinary. That is, things that have a face-value currency of meaning prior to any concealed meaning they may hold or suggest. Thus while Gateshead and Lowood School fit neatly into, and contribute importantly to, the symbolic pattern of the book, they are perfectly believable places in their own right. Even the heavy-handed and obvious satire of Mr Brocklehurst and his family does not invalidate him as a credible conception. But with the beginning of the mystery of the Thornfield attic the plot starts moving away from this facevalue actuality. ↗

— Ian Gregor

#family

Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering. ↗

— Colin Firth

#bridget #bridget jones #enormously #flattering #jones

I had all the normal interests - I played basketball and I headed the school paper. But I also developed very early a great love for music and literature and the theater. ↗

— Carlisle Floyd

#basketball #developed #early #great #great love

He had a way with him. Before you had a chance to say no, he was there and done. That only happened to me once before, with a duke, who literally swept me off my feet, and before I knew what was happening, we'd done it. Another terrible mistake. ↗

— Christine Keeler

#before #chance #done #duke #feet

The hall-mark of American humour is its pose of illiteracy. ↗

— Ronald Knox

#humour #illiteracy #pose

My father also happened to be an intellectual, as learned, literate, informed, and curious as anyone I have known. Unobtrusively and casually, he was my wise and gentle teacher. ↗

— James Tobin

#anyone #casually #curious #father #gentle

How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions? ↗

— Polly Toynbee

#art #culture #history #how #iconography

I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did. ↗

— Julie Walters

#because #become #did #great #great literature

Nothing about it interested me. Or about anything else, except making up stories. If literacy weren't so nearly universal, God knows what I'd be. A drain on the State, I shouldn't wonder. ↗

— Donald E. Westlake

#anything #drain #else #except #god

There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society. ↗

— Irvine Welsh

#celebrity #create #edinburgh #happening #highbrow