#literature

Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice. ↗

— Asti Hustvedt

#decadence #decadent #illusion #language #literature

I won't stop writing until I am known as the Kurt Cobain of literature! ↗

— Christina Westover

#goals #inspirational #literature #writing #dreams

It will begin with the six who now tread the streets of a city where the stone pinnacle erects like a reed amongst long grass. Where a bridge expands across a gorge, drifts a cloud buzzing with a million stings. There, these six shall bleed. There, these six shall die, and like a plague shall spread the wings that carry the cloud till they consume the city, and with it, the strength that fuels all of your lives. Farewell, children of the new world, and may your deaths be swift. ↗

— Najeev Raj Nadarajah

#dreamweaver #dystopian #dystopian-fiction #epic-fantasy #fantasy

Propping up a seat at the bar we devour chicken wings like life does dreams ↗

— David Louden

#literature #roman-á-clef #dreams

Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction. ↗

— Walter Moers

#reading #dreams

As George Russell defined a literary movement: “Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other. ↗

— Ross Wetzsteon

#movement #dreams

Dream by making and make by dreaming. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dream #dreaming #literature #literature-quotes #making

They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction. 'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all. ↗

— John Gardner

#historical-fiction #last-lines #literature #retelling #historical

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#literature #mystery #education

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former. ↗

— Northrop Frye

#language #life #literature #participate #power