No subscription or hidden extras
Read through the most famous quotes by topic #literary
What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this for half an hour. It will be a change. ↗
Let us look once more at Yeats. At bottom, he was sceptical about the nonsense with which he satisfied what we can call his lust for commitment. Now and again he believed some of it, but in so far as his true commitment was to poetry he recognized his fictions as heuristic and dispensable, 'consciously false.' 'They give me metaphors for poetry,' he noted. The dolls and the amulets, the swords and the systems, were the tools of an operationalist. Yeats was always concerned that what made sense to him in terms of the system should make sense to others who shared with him not that arbitrary cipher-system but the traditional language of poetry. In this way he managed, sometimes at any rate, to have his cake and to eat it. The rough beast of the apocalyptic 'Second Coming,' and the spiralling falcon of the same poem, mean something in the system, but for the uninstructed reader they continue to mean something in terms of a broader system of cultural and linguistic conventions--the shared information codes upon which literature, like any other method of communication, depends. So too in the later plays, which analytic criticism tells us are very systematic, but which Yeats himself declared must conceal their esoteric substance and sound like old songs. So too with the Byzantium poems, and the Supernatural Songs; even a poem like 'The Statues,' which contains notions that are bound to see inexplicably strange to one who knows nothing of Yeats's historical and arthistorical opinions, takes its place in our minds not as a text which codes information more explicitly provided in On the Boiler but as one which in some measure our reading of the other poems, and the persona of the wild old man, can justify. Yeats, in a famous phrase which has occasionally floated free of its context, said that the System enabled him to hold together reality and justice in a single thought. Reality is, in this expression, the sense we have of a world irreducible to human plot and human desire for order; justice is the human order we find or impose upon it. The System is in fact all Justice; in combination with a sense of reality which has nothing whatever to do with it, it became a constituent of poems. The System is a plot, a purely human projection, though not more human than its apparent antithesis, reality, which is a human imagining of the inhuman. For a moment, in that expression, Yeats saw himself as an emperor dispensing equity, transcending both the fact and the pattern; it is what poets do. Only rarely did he forget that whatever devotes itself to justice at the expense of reality, is finally self-destructive. He might talk about the differences between the symbolic meanings of poetry and those 'emotional restless mimicries of the surface of life' which were for him the characteristics of 'popular realism,' but he understood very well the need for that 'moral element in poetry' which is 'the means whereby' it is 'accepted into the social order and becomes a part of life.' He understands the tension between a paradigmatic order where the price of a formal eternity is inhumanity, and the world of the dying generations; that is the subject of 'Sailing to Byzantium,' the poem I quoted at the outset of these talks. He was talking about this tension again in one of his last poems, when he distinguished between 'Players and painted stage'--the justice of formal poems--and 'the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart'--the human dirt and disorder that underlie them. The whole history of Yeats's style, which from the earliest times, before the turn of the century, he was trying to move towards colloquial uncertainty, reflects this regard for the reality that will not be reduced. In the end this modernism took on characteristic colours of violence, a sexual toughness and slang to represent what Yeats took to be a modern reality. ↗
She let her mind drift, thinking about new lingerie designs, wishing she'd brought along her sketchpad. Inspiration could strike at the most inconvenient times--in the shower, in the car, on this road--but she was grateful it was with her again, an old companion with whom she was getting reacquainted, pleased to find they could take up where they'd left off, as if there'd been no estrangement at all. ↗
All I want is to sleep--to dream. Life is better in dreams. ↗
#dreams #literary-fiction #literary-quotes #poisoning-sylvie #san-francisco
Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don't mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery. ...I hate it because of all the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages, that it snuffs out every year. It is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egotists that survive. ↗
The daughter of the literary biographer Leslie Stephen, and close friend of the innovative biographer of the Victorians, Lytton Strachey, Woolf herself put forward, in ‘The New Biography’ (1927) (reviewing work by another biographer acquaintance, Harold Nicolson), her own memorable theory of biography, encapsulated in her phrase ‘granite and rainbow’. ‘Truth’ she envisions ‘as something of granite-like solidity’, and ‘personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility’, and ‘the aim of biography’, she proposes, ‘is to weld these two into one seamless whole’ (E4 473). The following short biographical account ofWoolf will attempt to keep to the basic granitelike facts that Woolf novices need to know, while also occasionally attending in brief to the more elusive, but equally relevant, matter of rainbow-like personality. ↗
Возвращение «Земную жизнь пройдя до половины», остановился я. И повернулся спиною к будущему: «там не ждут меня» - и пройденным уже путем пошел. Я вышел вон из ряда тех, кто испокон веков, обманываясь, ожидает, что выпадет счастливый случай, ключ повернется, истина откроется – откроются врата веков, и кто-то молвит: «Нет ни врат и ни веков». Я позади оставил улицы, и площади, и греческие статуи – в холодном свете утра, и только ветер был живым среди могил. За городом – поля, а за полями – ночь и пустыня: то сердце одинокое мое – ночь и пустыня. И в свете солнца камнем стал я, зеркалом и камнем. Затем – осталась позади пустыня – стал морем и над морем – черным небом, огромным камнем с полустертыми словами: «Нет звезд во мне». И вот – пришел. Врата разрушены, и ангел мирно дремлет. А за вратами – сад: густые кроны, дыхание камней, почти живых, магнолий сон глубокий, и свет – нагой среди стволов нарядных. Вода потоками-руками обнимает цветущий луг. И в центре – дерево и девочка-дитя; о, солнечный огонь ее волос! И нагота меня не тяготила: я был в воде и воздуху подобен. Укрытая сиянием зеленым древа, уснувшая в траве, она была – оставленное ветром белое перо. Ее поцеловать хотел я, но воды журчанье вдруг пробудило жажду, я склонился над зеркалом воды и на себя взглянул. И я увидел: рот, искаженный жаждой, мертвым был; о, старец алчущий, о, виноградная лоза, агония огня! Я наготу свою прикрыл. И тихо вышел. Смеялся ангел. И поднялся ветер, и мне глаза песком засыпал ветер. Песок и ветер – то мои слова; не мы живем, нас создает живыми время. ↗
