#literature

"I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one."

"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."

"I always thought it was Mo Be Dick. I know Mo, and he is a dick."

"Busy with the ugliness of the expensive success We forget the easiness of free beautyLying sad right around the corner, Only an instant removed, Unnoticed and squandered."

"I believe love at first sight is possible. Centuries of literature and art and beauty has been dedicated to that idea, so who am I to argue, even if I've never experienced it?"

"A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships."

"Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life."

"Even bad books are books and therefore sacred."

"A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is."

"The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves."

"Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you."

"She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells."

"How keen everyone is to make this world their home forgetting its impermanence It's like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display."

"Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts."

"You never know who you're inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think."

"The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools."

"She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water."

"In the end, you have to choose whether or not to trust someone."

"Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces."

"There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause."