#liter

The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is unreliable. Today it may be stunning, hypnotic. Tomorrow it may be lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet. ↗

— Will Christopher Baer

#noir-fiction #surreal #surreal

All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we has a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of and old idea the Revelation and the World. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#beauty

In the lie of truth lies the truth. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #lie #lies #literature #literature-quotes

When you work on something that combines both the spectacular and the relatable, the hyperreal and the real, it suddenly can become supernatural. The hypothetical and the theoretical can become literal. ↗

— J. J. Abrams

#both #combines #hypothetical #literal #real

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#begin #color #different #different color #different kind

The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#bad #body #contact #european #five

The literary culture, if you examine it, the high literary culture is that which preserves the government and you know it's really the talk for those who have. ↗

— Kathy Acker

#examine #government #high #know #literary

I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there. ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#career #created #felt #fled #having

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature. ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#become #being #class #i #i think

There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap. ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#felt #gap #i #i think #know