#literature

This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey) ↗

— Kellie Elmore

#country #finding-yourself #inspiring #journey #literature

The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species. ↗

— Machado de Assis

#creativity #literature #novels #writers #writing

This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers. ↗

— P.G. Wodehouse

#brain-power #intelligence #literature #mental-power #reading

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

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature. ↗

— Willa Cather

#down #gets #great #itself #last

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared. ↗

— Michael Cunningham

#appeared #books #both #commercially #complete

أي فن من الفنون يجب أن يحمل معه فكر. سواء كان الفكر أو الرسالة فلسفية أو اجتماعية أو عقائدية، دون أن يتخذ ذلك نبرة عالية زاعقة مباشرة يظهر الفن فيها بمظهر الوسيلة الثانوية. الفن متعة قبل كل شيء. إن لم تستطع إمتاعي فلن تستطيع إقناعي ↗

— توفيق الحكيم

#criticism #literature #art

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented. ↗

— Northrop Frye

#conventional #copyright #day #disguised #distinctive

You're only as sick as your secrets. ↗

— Rick Warren

#life-changing #religion-literature #change

Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night. ↗

— Stephen Crane

#courage