#paradise

It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature. ↗

— John Drinkwater

#achievement #among #asserted #commonly #english

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other. ↗

— Jean Baudrillard

#disneyland #just #may #monotonous #mournful

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts. ↗

— Voltaire

#hell #made #paradise #tender

By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise. ↗

— Adolf Hitler

#extremely #heaven #hell #life #make

You deal with mythological stuff for a few years, you learn that paradises are usually places where you get killed. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#mythological #paradise #humor

Soon after, I returned home to my family, with a determination to bring them as soon as possible to live in Kentucky, which I esteemed a second paradise, at the risk of my life and fortune. ↗

— Daniel Boone

#bring #determination #esteemed #family #fortune

The Indians knew that life was equated with the earth and its resources, that America was a paradise, and they could not comprehend why the intruders from the East were determined to destroy all that was Indian as well as America itself. ↗

— Dee Brown

#comprehend #could #destroy #determined #earth

In my view, America has never had the opportunity to enter paradise. Europe enjoys the paradise it enjoys, in part because the United States provides the overall security that allows Europe to live in a system where military power is not a major issue. ↗

— Robert Kagan

#america #because #enjoys #enter #europe

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it’s communication. ↗

— William L. Stull

#carver #chekhov #chico-state #john-gardner #paradise

I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia. ↗

— Marguerite Young

#been #cause #i #leader #lost