#literature

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone? ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#authors #book #book-cover #books #criticism

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#language #literary-criticism #literature #truth #literary-criticism

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#literature #literary-criticism

I was beginning to understand something I couldn't articulate. It was a jazzy feeling in my chest, a fluttering, a kind of buzzing in my brain. Warmth. Life. The circulation of blood. Sanguinity. I don't know. I understood the enormous risk of telling the truth, how the telling could result in every level of hell reigning down on you, your skin scorched to the bone and then bone to ash and then nothing but a lingering odour of shame and decomposition, but now I was also beginning to understand the new and alien feeling of taking the risk and having the person on the other end of the telling, the listener, say: Bad shit at home? You guys are running away? Yeah, I said. I understand, said, Noehmi. ↗

— Miriam Toews

#feeling #irma-voth #life #literature #miriam-toews

There can be no forced inspiration. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #inspiration #literature #literature-quotes #philosophy

But you raised a ruckus about and threatened to perform a Julius Caesarian on anybody on anybody who calls April the cruelest month- I was Damn born out of the loins of my father in the spring of April, you claimed. Surgeon, you stood up for the month of buds and bitches like a true Kuon Kunos ↗

— Aporva Kala

#life

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it. ↗

— Alexander Theroux

#humor #humour #literature #reading #vocabulary

Busy with the ugliness of the expensive success We forget the easiness of free beauty Lying sad right around the corner, Only an instant removed, Unnoticed and squandered. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#busy #corner #dejan-stojanovic #expensive #free

Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. (Southey's reply to Charlotte Bronte) ↗

— Southey

#literature #business

No matter how strong you are, you cannot hold open the jaws of a great-white shark with your bare hands... that can do your brain. ↗

— Ivan Stoikov

#books #fantasy #fiction #humour #kids-funny-business