#ode

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

I don't believe for a minute-that we wouldn't have become friends somehow-that an unexploded bomb wouldn't have gone off and blown us both into the same crater, or that God himself wouldn't have come along and knocked our heads together in a flash of green sunlight. But it wouldn't have been likely. ↗

— Elizabeth Wein

#fate #friends #friendship #julie #kittyhawk

I live my life by a code. I drew on the Magna Carta for inspiration. It may have been the most expensive doodle ever. The British Library kicked me out, and threatened to prosecute me if they couldn’t repair the documents. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#funny #funny

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived! ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#empathy #modern-society #progress #shallowness #technology

When you choose a man who thinks eight seconds is a long time, perhaps you need two of them. Hmm? ↗

— Cat Johnson

#humor #rodeo #romance #humor

Czech beer in bottles is the corpse of real beer in a glass coffin. ↗

— Sergei Lukyanenko

#anton-gorodetsky #beer #humor #humor

I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well." ~ Bertram "Bertie" Wooster ↗

— P.G. Wodehouse

#jeeves #sherlock-holmes #wodehouse #wooster #imagination

The Lord spoke to her of his love for her-that she was his daughter, that he cared for her, that he had died for her. He said that he would have died if she had been the only one. He would have suffered at Calvary for her sins, if hers had been the only ones. ↗

— Carlfred Broderick

#inspirational #inspirational

It was a rather extraordinary conversation if you think about it -- both of us speaking in code. But not military code, not Intelligence or Resistance code -- just feminine code. ↗

— Elizabeth Wein

#womanhood #women #intelligence

---In his major phase, he[Conrad] was "ahead of his times" in ideas and techniques;and this was because he was more intelligently and perceptively of his times than most writers then were. In his vigilant response to 19th century preoccupations, he anticipated--often critically--many 20th century preoccupations. He was a versatile intermediary between the Romantic and Victorian traditions and the innovations of Modernism. ↗

— Cedric Watts A Preface to Conrad p

#literary-status #modernism #victorian #intelligence