#literature

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

#literature #art

We have no time to waste on insignificant books, hollow books, books that are there to please... We want books that cost their authors a great deal, books where you can feel the years of work, the backache, the writer's block, the author's panic at the thought that he might be lost: his discouragement, his courage, his anguish, his stubbornness, the risk of failure that he has taken. ↗

— Laurence Cossé

#literature #courage

Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs... And darkness winds between the characters. - Gormenghast ↗

— Mervyn Peake

#classic #gormenghast #gothic #literature #art

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships--and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes--husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer... ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#history #literature #art

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#art

WE ARE the PULSE of the TIMES! ↗

— Carrie White

#biography #carrie-white #carrie-white-hairdresser #inspirational #literature

Possible is more a matter of attitude, A matter of decision, to choose Among the impossible possibilities, When one sound opportunity Becomes a possible solution. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#choices #decision #decisions #dejan-stojanovic #impossibility

Beauty doesn't have to be about anything. What's a vase about? What's a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart's Twenty-third Piano Concerto about? ↗

— Douglas Adams

#beauty-in-literature #beauty-in-nature #wodehouse #beauty

Too many things have changed. Too much time has passed. I'm different now, a man with a pocketful of unconnected but terribly vivid memories. I was looking to dredge up what I'd long forgotten. Most of all, I am wishing for something to fasten all these gems, maybe something to hold them in a continuity that I can comprehend. ↗

— Andrew X. Pham

#catfish-and-mandala #change #past #vietnam #vietnamese-literature

...but don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. That's my Achilles' heel, and don't you forget it. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I'm limp, by God... ↗

— J.D. Salinger

#franny-and-zooey #j-d-salinger #jd-salinger #life #literature