#literature

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.) ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#criticism #literature #reading #art

Praise be to God, Who has so disposed matters that pleasant literary anecdotes may serve as an instrument for the polishing of wits and the cleansing of rust from our hearts. ↗

— Ahmad Al-Tifashi

#literature #religion #religion

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become. ↗

— C. S. Lewis

#already #become #competencies #daily #daily life

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#england #homophobia #homosexuality #lgbt-literature #maurice-novel

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head. ↗

— John Green

#literature #reading #words #acting

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#canon #literature #writing #art

he 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

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. ("The New Russian Prose") ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#fantasy #literature #realism #art

Ela acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam" | "She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed ↗

— Clarice Lispector

#believe #dream #literature #dreams

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. ↗

— J.D. Salinger

#books #literature #reading #writing #read