#ok

When I write after dark", observed Cyril Connolly, "the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose ↗

— Anne Fadiman

#essays #humor #night #humor

That's my point: if you own thirty or more books, or you are reading any book at this moment, you may protest all you want, but you were born on the wrong continent. ↗

— Thomas Geoghegan

#books #europe #humor #reading #humor

Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better. ↗

— Stephen Potter

#criticism #humor #writing #humor

(Regarding check-cashing places): It's hitting me how poor this really is: I'm standing in a long line to pay someone to give me my pay. So, technically, they get paid before I do, and it's my damn check. ↗

— Angela Nissel

#cash #humor #money #poor #poor-people

His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by nationality and subject matter. ↗

— Anne Fadiman

#humor #humor

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. ↗

— Caitlin Moran

#libraries #profound #imagination

Dear Philip, I don't imagine you will ever read this. If you do, it is bacause something dreadful has happened to me. I find myself in the hands of a dangerous man. I am determined to fight him but before I do, my heart demands that I write this note to tell you that I love you. I am sending my heart to you in this letter so it will be kept safe from whatever may happen to me tonight. I don't know if you want it or not, but it has always been yours. With all my love, Marianne ↗

— Julianne Donaldson

#regency-romance #imagination

Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one's own latent greatness ↗

— Italo Svevo

#imagination

Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say ↗

— Vladimir Mayakovsky

#imagination #inspiration #novels #writing #imagination

You never forget the books you loved as a kid. You never forget the poems you memorized, the first book you read until the cover fell off, the book you read hidden from your mother. What an honor to hold hands with a child's imagination in this way. ↗

— Meg Medina

#reading #imagination