#nat

It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement. ↗

— Ann Patchett

#imagination

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting. ↗

— Michael Ondaatje

#toronto #toronto-literature #imagination

For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living. ↗

— Edith Grossman Why Translation Matters

#literature-in-translation #imagination

Meanwhile, the originator of a theory may have a very lonely time, especially if his colleagues find his views of nature unfamiliar, and difficult to appreciate. ↗

— Peter D. Mitchell

#colleagues #difficult #especially #find #his

The final outcome cannot be known, either to the originator of a new theory, or to his colleagues and critics, who are bent on falsifying it. Thus, the scientific innovator may feel all the more lonely and uncertain. ↗

— Peter D. Mitchell

#cannot #colleagues #critics #either #feel

It’s despicable of an author to kill his main personage solely for stirring imagination of indifferent or mean minds. ↗

— Lara Biyuts

#creative-writing #imagination

Writing for adults often means just increasing the swearing - but find an alternative to swearing and you've probably got a better line. ↗

— Steven Moffat

#better #find #got #increasing #just

Commitment and co-operation to overcome barriers and difficulties, and determination to achieve the standards of the EU as well as NATO membership, are and have always been the principal target. ↗

— Alfred Moisiu

#always #barriers #been #co-operation #commitment

While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world, West, for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#jhumpa-lahiri #imagination

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers. ↗

— Claude Monet

#am #become #being #flowers #following