#literary

It was as if they'd discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems only right and expectable for married people. They caught a glimpse of the person they fell in love with, and who sustained life. For some, that vision must never dim - as is true of me. But it was odd that our parents should catch their glimpse, and have frustration, anxiety and worry pass away like clouds dispersing after a storm, refind their best selves, but for that glimpse to happen just before landing our family in ruin. ↗

— Richard Ford

#crime #literary #marriage #family

I can see the singles ad now: ‘Three straight men, a gay man and a woman trapped in one body, seeks a lady willing to share her lipstick and shoes. A perfect match must enjoy cleaning automatic weapons, dividing anti-psychotic drugs into a weekly pill keeper, and long walks on the beach.’ The calls would just pour in. ↗

— Autumn Rosen

#men

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting. ↗

— David Antin

#centuries #circles #commonplace #like #literary

I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings. ↗

— Jonathan Miller

#asking #audience #deconstruction #fashion #gratuitous

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#european-novelists #literary-tradition #literature-in-translation #art

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth. ↗

— Michael Shermer

#historical #historical fact #into #literary #myth

Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons. ↗

— Roman Payne

#cash #credit-cards #digital-age #gold #literary-style

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#african #african-authors #african-literature #literary-fiction #literary-quotes

If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#creativity #literary-criticism #self-expression #art

Pearl introduces an original story, in a form which was to become one of the most frequent in mediaeval literature, the dream-vision. Authors like Chaucer and Langland use this form, in which the narrator describes another world - usually a heavenly paradise - which is compared with the earthly human world. In Pearl, the narrator sees his daughter who died in infancy, 'the ground of all my bliss'. She now has a kind of perfect knowledge, which her father can never comprehend. The whole poem underlines the divide between human comprehension and perfection; these lines show the gap between possible perfection and fallen humanity which, thematically, anticipate many literary examinations of man's fall, the most well known being Milton's late Renaissance epic, Paradise Lost. ↗

— Ronald Carter

#dreams