#liter

literature is a way in which we can learn to live deeper lives -- husband with wife, parent with child, brother with sister, fellow member with fellow member. Most good authors are better than we are. They are much better company than our own friends. What comes from good company? What comes from good company is better manners, greater sensitivity, greater sensibility, greater empathy, great sympathy. Reading good literature makes us more capable of understanding other people, of loving other people, those whom we don't particularly want to love, even our enemies, as well as those closest to us. How can we expect to have full marriages when we are not going into those marriages with full minds and fine sensibilities? We are ignoring the tremendous possibilities of a delicate, well-poised, rich, sensitive life if we ignore the literature of the past. There is no substitute. ↗

— Arthur Henry King

#literature #family

Anything that doesn't fit this mode has been shoved into an area of lesser solemnity called 'genre fiction,' and it is here that the spy thriller and the crime story and the adventure story and the supernatural tale and the science fiction, however excellently written, must reside, sent to their rooms, as it were, for the misdemeanor of being enjoyable in what is considered a meretricious way. They invent, and we all know they invent, at least up to a point, and they are, therefore, not about 'real life,' which ought to lack coincidences and weirdness and action-adventure, unless the adventure story is about war, of course, where anything goes, and they are, therefore, not solid. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#literary-snobbery #nonfiction #imagination

A little vanilla never hurt anybody.” He nipped her ankle. “Great shoes by the way. Sexy as hell. ↗

— Hanna Lui

#erotic-literature #erotic-romance #erotica #funny #funny

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying. ↗

— A.S. Byatt

#funny

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#humor #literary-criticism #humor

[I]t is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible. ↗

— Jane Austen

#jane-austen-literature-humor #humor

I can see myself before myself— A being through dark scenery. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#being #circling #dark #dark-scenery #dejan-stojanovic

Any biographer must of necessity become a pilgrim a peripatetic, obsessed literary pilgrim, a traveler with four eyes. ↗

— Leon Edel

#become #biographer #eyes #four #literary

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature. ↗

— Carlos Fuentes

#animal #ends #everything #i #i am

The most interesting inconsistency in thought is connected with the Bower of Bliss. This passage--the twelfth canto of the second Book--is probably the best known in the whole poem and the most frequently cited as an example of Spenser's sensuous beauty. Professor de Selincourt writes: 'Those who blame Spenser for lavishing the resources of his art upon this canto, and filling it with magic beauty, have never been at the heart of the experience it shadows. It is from the ravishing loveliness of all that surrounds and leads to the Bower of Acrasia that she herself draws her almost irresistible power. When Guyon has bound Acrasia and destroyed the Bower of Bliss he has achieved his last and hardest victory. ↗

— Janet Spens

#art