#literature

There is a master way with words which is not learned but is instead developed: a deaf man develops exceptional vision, a blind man exceptional hearing, a silent man, when given a piece of paper... ↗

— Criss Jami

#building-up #compression #creativity #deaf #development

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination. ↗

— Charles Simic

#literary-theory #literature #imagination

La politique au milieu des intérêts d'imagination, c'est un coup de pistolet au milieu d'un concert. ↗

— Stendhal

#politics #imagination

The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes. ↗

— Azar Nafisi

#literature #morality #home

Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. ↗

— Joan D. Vinge

#beyond #both #climb #compelled #enjoy

The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions. To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent. ↗

— Northrop Frye

#identity #literary-criticism #imagination

We have invented the literature because the reality wasn’t imaginative enough and we also wanted to be alone, at least for a while! ↗

— Mehmet Murat ildan

#imagination

Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him. ↗

— Washington Irving

#the-mutability-of-literature #writers #writing #inspirational

You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#inspirational #knowledge #philosophy #inspirational

. . . a statement that is repugnant to one's beliefs can be as true as one that is pleasurable. ↗

— Taylor Caldwell

#classic-literature #inspirational-fiction #literary #inspirational