When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
Flannery O'ConnorTags: literature grotesque
From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.
Betty SmithTags: reading books solitude literature lonliness
Literature is a virus.
Corey RedekopTags: literature fiction medicine
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
Roland BarthesTags: literature language
Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when, while Adele played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line - that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen - that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach.
Charlotte BrontëTags: literature
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
C.S. LewisTags: words reading books literature longing
This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if he do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers.
P.G. WodehouseTags: intelligence reading books literature brain-power mental-power simplemindedness
I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
Wisława SzymborskaTags: words reading books literature
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
H.L. MenckenTags: literature
When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].
Simone de BeauvoirTags: books literature culture
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