#literature

Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he’s wrong. ↗

— Chad Harbach

#the-art-of-fielding #art

As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature. ↗

— Cao Yu

#difficult #digest #ideas #literature #number

When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her name was to be in the title of the story, it almost always worked. Then, later, when we'd passed a night of delicious love-making together, after she’d gone and I’d felt that feeling of happiness mixed with sorrow, I sometimes would write a book or story about her. Sometimes her character, her way about herself, her love-making, it sometimes marked me so heavily that I couldn't go on in life and be happy unless I wrote a book or a story about that woman, the happy and sad memory of that woman. That was the only way to keep her, and to say goodbye to her without her ever leaving. ↗

— Roman Payne

#inspiration #literature #love-making #romance #seduction

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues. ↗

— Phillips Brooks

#before #blooms #comes #full #hills

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

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

More than art, more than literature, music is universally accessible. ↗

— Billy Joel

#art #literature #more #music #than

Internationalism on the other hand admits that spiritual achievements have their roots deep in national life; from this national consciousness art and literature derive their character and strength and on it even many of the humanistic sciences are firmly based. ↗

— Christian Lous Lange

#art #based #character #consciousness #deep

It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality. ↗

— James Loeb

#freshness #generation #greek #grow #grow up

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting. ↗

— Michael Ondaatje

#toronto #toronto-literature #imagination