#literature

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them — are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent. Perhaps the searchers will fail, perhaps it is impossible for the instrument of contemplation to contemplate itself, perhaps if it is possible it means the end of imaginative literature — [...] anyhow—that way lies movement and even combustion for the novel, for if the novelist sees himself differently, he will see his characters differently and a new system of lighting will result. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#imagination #literature #movement #novel #family

While it's true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for? ↗

— Elif Batuman

#tolstoy #unhappiness #family

Unfortunately, I have dedicated great effort to the task of compiling this ‘sensitive words glossary,’ and I have mastered my filtering skills. I knew which words and sentences had to be cut, and I accepted the cutting as if that was the way it should be. In fact, I will often take it on myself to save time and cut a few words. I call this ‘castrated writing’ -—I am a proactive eunuch, I have already castrated myself before the surgeon raises his scalpel. ↗

— Murong Xuecun

#freedom-of-speech #freedom

If religion is true, one must believe. And if one chooses not to believe, one’s choice is marked under the category of a refusal, and is thus never really free: it has the duress of a recoil.” With literary belief, however, “one is always free to choose not to believe.” This, Wood argues, is the freedom of literature; it is what constitutes its “reality. ↗

— James Wood

#literature #quarterly-conversation #religion #freedom

Tell me something only you know and make a new friend. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #friends #friendship #literature #literature-quotes

Geography and mileage mean nothing. Separate is a single word that covers all distances that aren't together. ↗

— Rivera Sun

#friendship #geography #inspirational #literature-quotes #love

I don't remember who spoke first, but I do recall the first words between us: "How often we meet among old books!" This was the start of our friendship. ↗

— Ōgai Mori

#japan #japanese #japanese-literature #friendship

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was—perhaps rightly—scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century. ↗

— Thomas Keneally

#australian-literature #friendship #literature #modernism #nastiness

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#literature #life

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? ↗

— Donna Tartt

#literature #life