#literature

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it. ↗

— William Carlos Williams

#change

Science has discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: 'all meanings depend on the key of interpretation.' What makes us human, and what makes each of us his or her own human, is not simply the genes that we have buried into our base pairs, but how our cells, in dialogue with our environment, feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves. Life is a dialectic. ↗

— Jonah Lehrer

#genes #genome #life #literature #science

It was like dawn, and then dusk cascading over the Himalayas. First, the gradual brightening over snow and contour, then the shining, sparkling sun mirrored; and then as the moment of joy passed – the lingering colour-changing light; reluctant to leave. That faint, bittersweet almost-light, and then indigo outlines and inky black. ↗

— Radhika Mukherjee

#beauty-in-literature #inspirational #our-particular-shadows #promise #radhika-mukherjee

My soul is in the sky. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#literature #wisdom #dreams

Do you realize that all great literature — "Moby Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Farewell to Arms," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Red Badge of Courage," "The Iliad and The Odyssey," "Crime and Punishment," the Bible, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" — are all about what a bummer it is to be a ...human being? ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#literature #courage

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind. ↗

— John Green

#literature #past #present #tense #time

...He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die. ↗

— Cormac McCarthy

#haunting #literature #death

If birth is a manifestation of life, death is another. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#death #dejan-stojanovic #life #literature #literature-quotes

A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#authorship #schopenhauer #writing #art

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#literature #art