#literature

Perversion is just another form of art. It's like painting or drawing or sculpting. Except instead of paint, us perverts use sex as our medium.  ↗

— C.M. Stunich

#erotic #erotic-literature #erotica #excite #form-of-art

La emoción trágica, efectivamente, es una cara que mira en dos direcciones: hacia el terror y hacia la piedad, y ambos son fases de ella. Habrás visto que uso la palabra paraliza. Quiero decir que la emoción trágica es estática. O más bien que la emoción dramática lo es. Los sentimientos excitados por un arte impuro son cinéticos, deseo y repulsión. El deseo nos incita a la posesión, a movernos hacia algo; la repulsión nos incita al abandono, a apartarnos de algo. Las artes que sugieren estos sentimientos, pornográficas o didácticas, no son, por tanto, artes puras. La emoción estética es por consiguiente estática. El espíritu queda paralizado por encima de todo deseo, de toda repulsión. ↗

— James Joyce

#literature #art

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others? ↗

— James Salter

#literature #reading #words #change

Literature simply becomes richer after you've been fired, rejected, stranded, or had to change a few midnight diapers. ↗

— Christian Bauman

#books #literature #change

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it. ↗

— William Carlos Williams

#change

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails…and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.” — Anonymous Curse on Book Theives from the Monaster of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain ↗

— Anatole Broyard

#essays #literature #quotes-to-live-by #change

It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#literature #philosophy-of-life #change

Flannery O'Connor, in a note to the editor of "Wise Blood" that pertained to changes he wanted to make, wrote "Perhaps I am prematurely arrogant . . . ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#southern-writers #change

Science has discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: 'all meanings depend on the key of interpretation.' What makes us human, and what makes each of us his or her own human, is not simply the genes that we have buried into our base pairs, but how our cells, in dialogue with our environment, feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves. Life is a dialectic. ↗

— Jonah Lehrer

#genes #genome #life #literature #science

It was like dawn, and then dusk cascading over the Himalayas. First, the gradual brightening over snow and contour, then the shining, sparkling sun mirrored; and then as the moment of joy passed – the lingering colour-changing light; reluctant to leave. That faint, bittersweet almost-light, and then indigo outlines and inky black. ↗

— Radhika Mukherjee

#beauty-in-literature #inspirational #our-particular-shadows #promise #radhika-mukherjee