#literature

..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision. ↗

— Ivan Klíma

#literature #writers #writing #communication

Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader. ↗

— Georges Bataille

#literature #reader #rebellion #writers #writing

It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that … [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#literature #truth #beauty

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.' Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication. —Literature and Evil ↗

— Georges Bataille

#evil #literature #morality #communication

My soul is in the sky. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#literature #wisdom #dreams

Do you realize that all great literature — "Moby Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Farewell to Arms," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Red Badge of Courage," "The Iliad and The Odyssey," "Crime and Punishment," the Bible, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" — are all about what a bummer it is to be a ...human being? ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#literature #courage

We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy or sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves. Whenever I feel my courage wavering, I rush to them. They give me the wisdom of acceptance, the will and resiliance to push on. ↗

— Helen Hayes

#inspirational #literature #power-of-stories #reading #courage

Kill me, or you are a murderer. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#literature #death

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#death #literature #reading #words #death

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#library #literature #reading #words #death