...Quotes on Reading, Writing @ Literature...

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“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” — Oscar Wilde

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“Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.” — Louisa May Alcott

hunchback

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. – H.P. Lovecraft -

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Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift. —Kate DiCamillo

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Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while. —Malorie Blackman

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The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. —Ursula K. Le Guin

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Reading—the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay. —William Styron

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A book is a dream you hold in your hands. —Neil Gaiman

seribulan

    No two persons ever read the same book.

    –Edmund Wilson

seribulan

   Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.

    –Vera Nazarian

bianglala

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]"
— Carl Sagan (Cosmos)

bianglala

"Classics aren't books that are read for pleasure. Classics are books that are imposed on unwilling students, books that are subjected to analyses of "levels of significance" and other blatt, books that are dead."

— Alexei Panshin (Rite of Passage)

bianglala

"People recover differently. Some change cities, some fall in love and some begin writing."

— Kanza Javed (Ashes, Wine and Dust)

bianglala

"I call that creativity," Orville said. "The purpose of literature is to teach you how to THINK, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated events is the only way we are equipped to understand patterns in the real world."

— Catherine Lowell (The Madwoman Upstairs)

bianglala

"I have been asked to explain what I meant by saying that "Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity." I have no notion when I said it or where I said it, or even whether I said it; in the sense that I do not now remember ever saying it at all. But I do know why I said it; if I ever said it at all."

— G.K. Chesterton (The Spice of Life)

bianglala

"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."

— Mokokoma Mokhonoana

bianglala

"Reading the book now means that one can, if one wants, play Fantasy Literature--match writers off against each other and see who won over the long haul. Faulkner or Henry Green? I reckon the surprise champ was P.G. Wodehouse, as elegant and resourceful a prose stylist as anyone held up for our inspection here...he has turned out to be as enduring as anyone apart from Orwell. Jokes, you see. People do like jokes.

(Hornby's thoughts after reading "Enemies of Promise" by Cyril Connolly)"
— Nick Hornby (The Polysyllabic Spree)

bianglala

"The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted…Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature…we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

[Final passage in "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, by Roland Barthes, Trans. Stephen Heath (1977)]"
— Roland Barthes, Trans. Stephen Heath (1977)

seribulan

“The first draft of anything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway

bianglala

Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times? As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both strange and familiar.

— Cornelia Funke, The Inkheart