Literature Quotes - Page 24

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

Flannery O'Connor

The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh.

David Foster Wallace

Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and it is the lover's privilege.

He pries me from his chest and drops his hand from the back of my head, tracing my ear, along my jawline. He snatches his fingers a moment before they press into my lip.

I am gone tomorrow. And there and gone again by the time you read this.

Salvador Plascencia

A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth.

It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are.

Alasdair MacIntyre

Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.

George Albert Wells

You will come across people who always affirm by everything you say, but at the hour of need, they simply disappear! Stay away from such people or simply don't fall for their promises.

A story has to break your heart or it's not worth telling.

..home INSIDE is home shining brightly above all homes in physical world.

Christina Westover

Energy manipulation took place completely in mind,same way believing in telepathy caused telepathic abilities to grow STRONGER.

Christina Westover

Defining moment in new telepathist's life, moment when intuitive individual learns most of society isn't telepathic, doesn't see auras,doesn't know what life on ethereal astral plane is like.

Christina Westover

Ô, wine!, the truth-serum so potent that all those who wish to live happy lives should abstain from drinking it entirely!... except of course when they are alone.

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.

G.K. Chesterton

My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.

Gabrielle Zevin

Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings.

Mario Vargas Llosa

...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.

That's sounds right. Another $5,000 went to dress up the Little League park where he had played so many games. Seems like he paid off the MORTAGE on his parents' home, which wasn't that much.

Fiction though it is a fiction, should be written in a way that it feels like a reality, a reality every reader willingly or sometimes unwillingly goes through, until the reader finishes reading and sometimes even after that.

Like the 'good' characters in literature, the sane don't have any memorable lines.

Adam Phillips Going Sane

This was a crime of passion, but unlike most crimes of passion, it had been meticulously and diabolically well-planned.

Mark Zero

Bergé’s yelling had attracted the attention of everyone in the Kibati hall: champagne flutes stopped halfway to heavily painted lips, eyes widened, massive diamonds groaned scornfully in their settings. It was a stationary riot.

Mark Zero

All the great novels are about obsession and people who are obsessed.

In all ages woman has been the source of all that is pure, unselfish, and heroic in the spirit and life of man.....poetry and fiction are based upon woman's love, and the movements of history are mainly due to the sentiments or ambitions she has inspired......there is no aspiration which any man here to-night entertains, no achievement he seeks to accomplish, no great and honorable ambition he desires to gratify, which is not directly related to either or both a mother or a wife. From the hearth-stone around which linger the recollections of our mother, from the fireside where our wife awaits us, come all the purity, all the hope, and all the courage with which we fight the battle of life. The man who is not thus inspired, who labors not so much to secure the applause of the world as the solid and more precious approval of his home, accomplishes little of good for others or of honor for himself. I close with the hope that each of us may always have near us: 'A perfect woman, nobly planned,To warn, to comfort, and command,And yet a spirit still, and brightWith something of an angel light.

Chauncey Mitchell DePew

Playdate. (n) A Date arranged by adults in which young children are brought together, usually at the home of one of them, for the premeditated purpose of “playing”. A feature of contemporary American upscale suburban life in which “neighborhoods” have ceased to exist, and children no longer trail in and out of “neighbor childrens” houses or play in “backyards”. In the absence of sidewalks in newer “gated” coummunities, children cannot “walk” to playdates but must be driven by adults, usually mothers. A “playdate” is never initiated by the players (i.e., children), but only by their mothers.In American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you’ve been awaiting.

Joyce Carol Oates

In French culture, the best way of buying time or getting off the hook entirely in a thorny personal situation is to claim that it’s complicated. The French did not invent love, but they did invent romance, so they’ve had more time than any other culture on earth to refine the nuances of its language.

Mark Zero

The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.

Mark Zero

Freaky kids like us can’t ever be normal- Tyler says smugly- Our generation is some new kind of “evolutionary development”, my shrink says- “Normal” is just “average”, not cool. My latest diagnosis is “A.P.M”, Acute Premature Melancholia”, usually an affliction of late middle age, they think is genetic since Ty Senoir has had it all his life, too.You look if you might be A.P.M, too, Sky: that kind of pissed-off mopey look in your face like you swallowed something really gross and can’t spit it out.

Joyce Carol Oates

For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you”.

Joyce Carol Oates

... she was a pudding of immaturity and precocious wisdom that had not yet set into a stable mold.

Mark Zero

How can you be kissing at a time like this? Have you no respect for the dead?

Mark Zero

When you’re used to being in dangerous situations, you develop a sixth sense about your surroundings, about where possible enemies might be lurking, how many steps it will take to reach the next corner on a dead run, the best hiding places if bullets start to fly...

Mark Zero

Never run upstairs when someone’s chasing you. Don’t try to quick-draw a man who already has his gun out. Never light a match in the dark in a strange building. Half of staying safe is just keeping your head and being prudent.

Mark Zero

It wasn’t playing both sides of the fence – it was betting against yourself but still playing to win – and it encapsulated everything absurd and paradoxical that I loved about the French.

Mark Zero

And I had just kissed my ex-girlfriend, who had cried, while my current girlfriend was in jail. So far, it had not been my best day.

Mark Zero

I congratulate you on your success stealing the painting.

Mark Zero

Finding yourself and creating a life that feels authentic and safe is the hardest, most important work that we will ever do and for girls, especially young girls, there is no one more equipped to do this work.

Jennifer Elisabeth

The only way that you can identify and then fulfill your life’s purpose is for you to love yourself, charge up your life and serve the world.

Jennifer Elisabeth

Sometimes you have to let go a little bit and travel the path of least resistance but this doesn’t mean that you quit when things get tough, as you are working towards a goal! It just means that you may only be able to see a rough draft of your final destination, right now, and that it’s safe to explore along the way.

Jennifer Elisabeth

As girls, we will do anything for the person whom we love. We will scale buildings in the rain or run through fire if it means saving our love’s life. There is absolutely nothing more life altering that the fire burning inside of our souls for the one we want most…

Jennifer Elisabeth

For most of us free-thinking, wild hearts, our relationship with God or the Universe will go through peaks and valleys – transforming into new concepts and beliefs, completely disappearing, at times, only then to instantly explode back into existence by something even as small as a sunset!

Jennifer Elisabeth

Dear family,I am drafting a new laundry protocol for better and more considerate usage of the washing machine

How you spend your time when you are not working or studying says everything about who you are and what is motivating your life.

Jennifer Elisabeth

You battled monsters. You sweat and cried your way to this one prolific moment where you finally realize that those dark days and sleepless nights were pre-requisites to your becoming.

Jennifer Elisabeth

I never want a girl to lose all hope that her life can’t completely turn around, even if she feels that she is at the edge, standing on one foot, and ready to say goodbye.

Jennifer Elisabeth

We live in a world where there is such a clear definition of what a girl should be that it takes almost no effort at all to completely hate ourselves.

Jennifer Elisabeth

Remember, nothing happens before it’s supposed to, so trust that, as you are striving for authenticity and personal excellence, the recognition of your life’s purpose is nearing closer.

Jennifer Elisabeth

I think it all basically breaks down to something like this: You have to look and feel great first. If you eat well, exercise and get enough sleep, you will have ample energy and the proper self-confidence to create and produce beyond your wildest dreams! Looking great and radiating positive energy, while presenting your highest quality work, is what will always make you the most valuable and only logical choice in whatever it is that you reach for.

Jennifer Elisabeth

Although many things may still need to happen before you identify what your exact work will be, I know that every single person whom you’re meeting and every experience that you’re having is necessary to you discovering your purpose. They are points on a map leading you to the moment where a match will finally be lit and you will be able to see through the darkness.

Jennifer Elisabeth

Recognize that you have been chosen to be alive, right now, at this exact moment in time and know that none of that is random. There is something about you, your past or your future that is required at this exact moment in history. We need to know who you are and what you have been through.

Jennifer Elisabeth

There used to be a rubbish heap under the great tree in Dhoby Ghaut with a sarabat stall parked next to it. It was a low, sprawling rubbish heap made up of the usual things—refuse from dustbins, paper, old tins and slippers and leaves from the tree above. Then one day, people forgot about it. They found a new dumping place and the old rubbish heap settled low on the ground. Time passed and its contents became warm and rich and fertile and people living in the area would take away potfuls of it to plant flowers in.Somehow, a rose cutting, slim as a cheeping chicken’s leg and almost brown, appeared on the rubbish heap one day.

She remembered the way the damp, coarse sand had clumped to her legs and hands, and burrowed beneath her nails and into the folds of her clothes, and she had wondered why the British children in her storybooks were always excited about going to the beach—just as now she wondered why the light from the lighthouse seemed to be coming from the landward side of the expressway. “I thought a lighthouse is out at sea.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

Sentimentality was used because other political avenues were closed, and authors hoped that through it they could bring about a political change that would fulfill the egalitarian promises of the Revolution. Real political venues were unavailable, so fiction became a medium for authors to appeal to audiences for change.

Todd M. Brenneman

To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism.

We work all our lives to be who we become. And, it's who we become that determines what becomes of us.

Melinda West Seifert

Life really is a story, and every story comes to an end. At the same time, it seems we all leave in the middle of our own stories. It's who we become that gives the story body, form and meaning.

Melinda West Seifert

Stephen King once wrote, “Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear.” In a horror story, the victim keeps asking why - but there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one. The unanswered mystery is what stays with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll remember in the end.

Alan Wake

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