#literature

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#exists #idea #like #literature #mind

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation. ↗

— James Buchan

#arabic #became #country #distrusted #european

So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman. ↗

— Zora Neale Hurston

#literature #their-eyes-were-watching-god #zora-neale-hurston #dreams

In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing. ↗

— R.M. Engelhardt

#on-poetry #poet #r-m-engelhardt #writer #writing-life

The writer studies literature, not the world. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#studies #world #writer

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#literature #reads #studies #will #world

There are two methods for the literary study of any book - the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view. ↗

— Lafcadio Hearn

#being #bible #book #both #emotion

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible. ↗

— Washington Irving

#become #charm #distance #fades #fairy

Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award. ↗

— Elfriede Jelinek

#deserving #draft #employing #exposing #expression

The concept of industry domination of regulatory agencies was well known and documented in the literature by the 1960s. ↗

— Nick Johnson

#concept #documented #domination #industry #known