#literature

In loving him, I saw a cigarette between the fingers of a hand, smoke blowing backwards into the room and sputtering planes diving low through the clouds. In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life. ↗

— David Wojnarowicz

#lgbt-literature #queer-lit #life

Even great men bow before the Sun; it melts hubris into humility. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#great-men #hubris #humility #literature #literature-quotes

They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process. ↗

— Ryū Murakami

#japan #japanese #japanese-literature #murder #movies

I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both. ↗

— Jane Austen

#marianne-dashwood #sense-sensibility #music

You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instruments producing a confused agreeable mass of sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details. ↗

— Arnold Bennett

#music #music

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades. ↗

— Mark Twain

#critics #drama #literature #writing #music

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is color that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense. ↗

— Yann Martel

#story #music

To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #grimace #impersonal #impossible #light

Don't tell me you're reading it,' she said, as if I were doing something to the book, whereas in fact the book was doing something to me. ↗

— Sara Levine

#nature

We are not native. We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside. To me, that seems to be perfectly natural. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#americans #paul-auster #philip-roth #robert-mccrum #nature