#literature

I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books--I’m talking about my friends and myself--went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties. They showed us what was possible. We had been living with whatever was close at hand, whatever was given, and books took us great distances. We had known only domestic emotions and they showed us what happens to emotions when they are homeless. Books gave us balance--the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity. ↗

— Anatole Broyard

#literature #love

Language is the key to the heart of people. ↗

— Ahmed Deedat

#ahmed-deedat #arabic #christian #culture #deedat

Is that so? He who lives in the mountains years for the city, and the city-dweller would rather live in the mountains," the Abbot chuckled, "and nothing is ever to one's liking... ↗

— Eiji Yoshikawa

#the-heike-story #love

Here--you warriors--why this moaning and complaining? Have you no more sense than toads and vipers? Our time hasn't come. Have you no patience? Are we not the 'trodden weed' still? The time is not yet here for us to raise our heads. Must you still complain? ↗

— Eiji Yoshikawa

#taira-no-kiyomori #the-heike-story #love

I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings, and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly love this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was obliterated? ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#edward-said #literary-criticism #literature #postmodernism #love

I love you so much I hate you... ↗

— Carlene Carter

#anderbo-com #carlene-carter #every-little-thing #father-must #gail-hochman

Only where children gather is there any real chance of fun. ↗

— Mignon McLaughlin

#inspirational #young-adult-fiction #inspirational

In the end, you have to choose whether or not to trust someone. ↗

— Sophie Kinsella

#inspirational #literature #motivational #trust #inspirational

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ... ↗

— Eudora Welty

#creativity #inspiration #literature #reading #storytelling

O love, O fire! once he drew With one long kiss my whole soul through My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew. ↗

— Alfred Tennyson

#elegant #emotional #inspirational #literature #moving