#liter

I lived in a region in the northwestern province - the people there in general have a great love for the Taliban, so I started to read some of the literature of the scholars and the history of the movement. And my heart became attached to them. ↗

— John Walker Lindh

#became #general #great #great love #heart

I was dealing with craft, and that's the surprising thing, the number of people who have literally broken down on our stage, because when you're talking about the thing that is most important to someone, they're liable to feel something strong. ↗

— James Lipton

#because #broken #craft #dealing #down

You could hear him, literally, half a mile away when he opened up. He was at his peak then. He was, naturally, dying to get out of the place he was in, and he recorded for us his appeal for pardon to the governor. ↗

— Alan Lomax

#away #could #dying #get #governor

Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people. ↗

— Hugh Mackay

#before #class #confined #educated #goal

Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives. ↗

— Camilo Jose Cela

#literature #lives #times #which

I woke to the sound of rain. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#rain #simple #subtle #beauty

What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#any #become #been #book #brothers

Resta-nos esclarecer a parte que nesse golfo fantástico cabe ao imaginário indireto, ou seja, o conjunto de imagens que a cultura nos fornece, seja ela cultura de massa ou outra forma de tradição. Esta questão suscita de imediato uma outra: que futuro estará reservado à imaginação individual nessa que se convencionou chamar a "civilização da imagem"? O poder de evocar imagens [i]in absentia[/i] continuará a desenvolver-se numa humanidade cada vez mais inundada pelo dilúvio das imagens pré-fabricadas? Antigamente a memória visiva de um individuo estava limitada ao patrimônio de suas experiências diretas e a um reduzido repertório de imagens refletidas pela cultura; a possibilidade de dar forma a mitos pessoais nascia do modo pelo qual os fragmentos dessa memória se combinavam entre si em abordagens inesperadas e sugestivas. Hoje somos bombardeados por uma tal quantidade de imagens a ponto de não podermos distinguir mais a experiência direta daquilo que vimos há poucos segundos na televisão. Em nossa memória se depositam, por estratos sucessivos, mil estilhaços de imagens, semelhantes a um depósito de lixo, onde é cada vez menos provável que uma delas adquira relevo ↗

— Italo Calvino Six Memos for the Next Millennium

#imagination #literature #imagination

Suffice it to say I was compelled to create this group in order to find everyone who is, let's say, borrowing liberally from my INESTIMABLE FOLIO OF CANONICAL MASTERPIECES (sorry, I just do that sometimes), and get you all together. It's the least I could do. I mean, seriously. Those soliloquies in Moby-Dick? Sooo Hamlet and/or Othello, with maybe a little Shylock thrown in. Everyone from Pip in Great Expectations to freakin' Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre mentions my plays, sometimes completely mangling my words in nineteenth-century middle-American dialect for humorous effect (thank you, Sir Clemens). Many people (cough Virginia Woolf cough) just quote me over and over again without attribution. I hear James Joyce even devoted a chapter of his giant novel to something called the "Hamlet theory," though do you have some sort of newfangled English? It looks like gobbledygook to me. The only people who don't seek me out are like Chaucer and Dante and those ancient Greeks. For whatever reason. And then there are the titles. The Sound and the Fury? Mine. Infinite Jest? Mine. Proust, Nabokov, Steinbeck, and Agatha Christie all have titles that are me-inspired. Brave New World? Not just the title, but half the plot has to do with my work. Even Edgar Allan Poe named a character after my Tempest's Prospero (though, not surprisingly, things didn't turn out well for him!). I'm like the star to every wandering bark, the arrow of every compass, the buzzard to every hawk and gillyflower ... oh, I don't even know what I'm talking about half the time. I just run with it, creating some of the SEMINAL TOURS DE FORCE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. You're welcome. ↗

— Sarah Schmelling

#literary-influences #william-shakespeare #inspirational

Margarita was never short of money. She could buy whatever she liked. Her husband had plenty of interesting friends. Margarita never had to cook. Margarita knew nothing of the horrors of living in a shared flat. In short... was she happy? Not for a moment. ↗

— Mikhail Bulgakov

#friends #happiness #husband #inspirational #life