#literature

A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century 'reality', surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once embodied in myth. In approaching literature, it has aimed at restoring to the word its magical qualities. And at giving back to language the elemental power it once had within society. This determinism lies at the heart of the surrealist attitude and distinguishes it radically from the modernism which took shape contemporaneously with it. ↗

— Michael Richardson

#literature #magic #modernism #myth #surrealism

Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience. ↗

— Carl Clinton Van Doren

#actual #brought #curious #experience #facts

I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature. ↗

— David Eddings

#american literature #back #bad #bad back #by the time

The Brightness of her cheek would shame those stars as daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven would through the airy region stream so bright that birds would sing, and think it were not night. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#beauty #beauty-in-literature #beauty

You're only as sick as your secrets. ↗

— Rick Warren

#life-changing #religion-literature #change

Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art. ↗

— Alma Gluck

#art #days #devote #energies #himself

Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night. ↗

— Stephen Crane

#courage

It appeared that the swift wings of their desires would have shattered against the iron gates of the impossible. ↗

— Stephen Crane

#courage

Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses to write a play or a novel which causes a flutter and exchange of compliments in Chelsea and Chiswick and a faint thrill in Streatham and Surbiton, is described as "daring," though nobody on earth knows what danger it is that he dares. I speak, of course, of terrestrial dangers; or the only sort of dangers he believes in. To be extravagantly flattered by everybody he considers enlightened, and rather feebly rebuked by everybody he considers dated and dead, does not seem so appalling a peril that a man should be stared at as a heroic warrior and militant martyr because he has had the strength to endure it. ↗

— G. K. Chesterton

#literature #courage

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can. ↗

— Edith Hamilton

#great #historical #knowledge #literature #people