#literary

The urge to change my mind and not go at all is enormous. I’m absolutely terrified to leave on that boat. But, if I don’t go, there’ll be one more broken person in this world who gave up a dream to sit in a chair, pick up the TV remote and shrink. ↗

— Lexis De Rothschild

#cats #chick-lit #humor #kindle #literary-collections

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life. And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home. ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#fictional-london #imagination #life #literary-london #literature

It doesn't matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to follow a sequence of actual events or not. As far as its verbal shape is concerned, it will be equally mythical in either case. But we notice that any emphasis on shape or structure or pattern or form always throws a verbal narrative in the direction we call mythical rather than historical.(p.21) ↗

— Northrop Frye

#literary-theory #narrative-theory #world-culture #equality

I learned that it's okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv. ↗

— Jess C. Scott

#anti-twilight #dark-humor #drugs #gluttony #heroin

We served on the editorial board of a literary monthly called Face in 1968 and 1969. He was a young writer, and I was also interested in broad cultural issues. We agreed on all major issues and became friends. ↗

— Vaclav Klaus

#also #became #board #broad #called

Anonymous sources are a practice of American journalism in the 20th and 21st century, a relatively recent practice. The literary tradition of anonymity goes back to the Bible. ↗

— Joe Klein

#american #anonymity #anonymous #back #bible

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements. ↗

— Paul de Man

#certain #critical #denies #even #literary

If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep. (Puritans will object to the language in that sentence, and feminists to the organ, and neither will admire or even notice how it was phrased.) ↗

— William H. Gass

#art

There are numerous biographies of Woolf. Biography has been highly influential in shaping the reception ofWoolf ’s work, and her life has been as much debated as her writing. I would recommend the following three which represent three different biographical contexts and a range of positions on Woolf ’s life: Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972), Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (1996), and Julia Briggs’s Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005). There is no one, true biography of Woolf (as, indeed, there cannot be of any subject of biography), but these three mark important phases in the writing and rewriting of Woolf ’s life. Hot debate continues over how biographers represent her mental health, her sexuality, her politics, her suicide, and of course her art, and over how we are to understand the latter in relation to all the former points of contention. ↗

— Jane Goldman

#art

Most of the makers of the twentieth-century mind, figures such as Freud, Heisenberg, Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot, have in common an about-face on the subject-object question and the mindmatter question; they all reject the dualism that arbitrarily and irreversibly splits the world into pieces. This rejection of dualism and the corresponding reach for monism are of the essence in understanding the revolutionary nature of twentieth-century science and art. ↗

— Jewel Spears Brooker

#art