#literature

To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #grimace #impersonal #impossible #light

The heart of a father is the masterpiece of nature. ↗

— Antoine François Prévost

#fathers #french-literature #nature

It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years. ↗

— William Faulkner

#literature #nature

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#delillo #literature #terror #nature

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#literature #men

It seems to me as natural annd necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption. ↗

— F. L. Lucas

#nature

Don't tell me you're reading it,' she said, as if I were doing something to the book, whereas in fact the book was doing something to me. ↗

— Sara Levine

#nature

We are not native. We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside. To me, that seems to be perfectly natural. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#americans #paul-auster #philip-roth #robert-mccrum #nature

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#life #literature #reading #rape

Where do starfish come from?” asked Sam. “From the sky,” answered Stella. “Starfish are shooting stars that fell in love with the sea.” “Weren’t the stars afraid of drowning?” asked Sam. “No,” said Stella. “They all learned how to swim. ↗

— Marie-Louise Gay

#children-s-literature #creativity #cute #imagination #picture-books