#literature

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul ↗

— Albert Camus

#literature #writing #art

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength. ↗

— Lawrence Clark Powell

#capacity #creative #factual #fictional #lasting

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are. ↗

— Jose Saramago

#always #appreciated #because #cliches #copies

Here, you can walk into a bookstore and pick up a Bible or Christian literature and learn. Over there, they are lucky if they have one Bible for a whole village. ↗

— Michael Scott

#bookstore #christian #here #into #learn

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#condensed #experience #generation #his way #incontrovertible

Margarita was never short of money. She could buy whatever she liked. Her husband had plenty of interesting friends. Margarita never had to cook. Margarita knew nothing of the horrors of living in a shared flat. In short... was she happy? Not for a moment. ↗

— Mikhail Bulgakov

#friends #happiness #husband #inspirational #life

If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life. ↗

— Maria Kodama

#jorge-luis-borges #literature #maria-kodama #reading #life

Human beings have their great chance in the novel. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#meaning #meaning-of-life #life

I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But, probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clapsed her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: 'Oh, Hermann...." It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#love #love

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#books #literature #reading #literature