#literature

life was not easy, nor was it happy, but she did not expect life to be easy, and, if it was not happy, that was woman's lot. It was a man's world, and she accepted it as such. The man owned the property, and the woman managed it. The man took credit for the management, and the woman praised his cleverness. The man roared like a bull when a splinter was in his finger, and the woman muffled the moans of childbirth, lest she disturb him. Men were rough of speech and often drunk. Women ignored the lapses of speech and put the drunkards to bed without bitter words. Men were rude and outspoken, women were always kind, gracious and forgiving. ↗

— Margaret Mitchell

#literature #scarlett-o-hara #forgiveness

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was about: Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#fiction #god #life #literature #love

The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake. ↗

— Roman Payne

#artistic #creativity #equations #gifts #ideas

Friendship is merely a glorified expression. In reality it is nothing but a reciprocal outpouring of slops. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#friendship

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being. ↗

— Paul de Man

#betrays #both #error #exists #literature

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind. ↗

— Northrop Frye

#literature #metaphor #writing #education

Ma vie est une énigme dont ton nom est le mot. (My life is an enigma, of which your name is the word.) ↗

— Victor Hugo

#victor-hugo #life

The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#inspirational

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it. ↗

— Roger Ebert

#bookstores #history #literature #philosophy #reading

One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#literature #change