#literature

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#christiana-rossetti #inspiration #literature #vain #victorian-literature

It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality. ↗

— James Loeb

#freshness #generation #greek #grow #grow up

Literature gives us a window into other people's experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood. ↗

— Natalie Merchant

#childhood #different #different people #experiences #gives

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting. ↗

— Michael Ondaatje

#toronto #toronto-literature #imagination

For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living. ↗

— Edith Grossman Why Translation Matters

#literature-in-translation #imagination

That was always my fear, that perhaps books would lead me astray, teaching me about a life that didn’t match reality. ↗

— Stefanos Livos

#imagination #literature #reality #stories #teach

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while. ↗

— W.B. Yeats

#hope #literature #memory #poetry #art

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. ↗

— W. G. Sebald

#backbone #chance #clear #greater #happy

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#european-novelists #literary-tradition #literature-in-translation #art

Although there is a very large literature, still growing almost daily, on the Chinese calendar, its interest is, we suggest, much more archaeological and historical than scientific. ↗

— Joseph Needham

#although #archaeological #calendar #chinese #daily