#says

A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in 'Dracula' is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I have not yet found time to read 'Dracula. ↗

— Joe Queenan

#books #essays #humor #life #reading

Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on. ↗

— David Malouf

#fiction #literature #life

When life gives you twists and turns, Chique Yourself Up in Italy! ↗

— Barbara Conelli

#chique-secrets-of-dolce-vita #italy #travel #travel-essays #travel-narrative-nonfiction

They must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened from looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with money or move a girl's heart. ↗

— W.B. Yeats

#essays-and-introductions #money

The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#philosophy #photography #photography-quotes #nature

Say what you like about my bloody murderous government,' I says, 'but don't insult me poor bleedin' country. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#bloody #country #government #i #insult

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it. ↗

— Christopher Alexander

#becomes #build #cannot #coherent #fundamental

If the director says you can do better, particularly in a love scene, then it is rather embarrassing. ↗

— Julie Andrews

#director #embarrassing #love #love scene #particularly

When you grow up your mother says, 'Wear rubbers or you'll catch cold.' When you become an adult you discover that you have the right not to wear rubbers and to see if you catch cold or not. It's something like that. ↗

— Diane Arbus

#become #catch #cold #discover #grow

There's no rule, no law, no regulation that says you can't come back. So I have every right to come back. ↗

— Lance Armstrong

#come #every #i #law #regulation