literature

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture.

So what does it mean for a person to devote himself or herself to, as you put it, __iterary reading and thinking_? I would argue this is a person who__ trying to see things for what they are. Who__ interested in distinguishing the truth from the lies, the real from the fake, the solid from the cheap. Those are the people who want to think for themselves, and I really question whether we can make good lives for ourselves if we aren__ doing our own thinking.

Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products.

Two girls walk past in gargantuan heels and dresses so tight that their skin is spilling out, and one of them says to the other, "Wait, who the fuck is Lewis Carroll?" and in my imagination I pull a gun out of my pocket, shoot them both and then shoot myself.

For the majority of people, though they do not know what to do with this life, long for another that shall have no end.

The back of the church was raised up from the ground. Tossed in among its supports were what looked like moldering bones.My heart ached so much for these poor souls, neglected even after death, I turned away to head back, but managed only a few burdened steps.I drew up abruptly and froze.An old, worn marker, standing off by itself, grabbed at my heart.It was Edgar Alan Poe.He fit in so perfectly there. Maybe I did, too. His sorrow and pain ate through me as I stood, head lowered. Can__ even death let us step away from our darkness? It was like he was scratching a warning into the dirt with his finger, and meant it specifically for me. Don__ wait around for sermons to wash you clean, he seemed to say, for death or drugs to close your eyes. God won__ come roaring in with fresh troops to drive away the darkness we__e walled our own souls up in. He didn__ put us there; we__l have to dig ourselves out.I looked at my own life as I stood there, feeling buried alive, like some of his characters.But unlike his characters I had caught a flash of hope.

If literature matters today, it is chiefly because it seems to many conventional critics one of the few remaining places where, in a divided, fragmented world, a sense of universal value may still be incarnate; and where, in a sordidly material world, a rare glimpse of transcendence can still be attained.

In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.

Literature is impossible, in exactly this sense: every new generation has so much 'catching up' to do that the real choice that presents itself soon is the following one: one either spends ones entire life just reading all the classics, or one pretends to be 'contemporary and hip' and never reads any of the classics because in order to pretend to be contemporary one has to at least superficially read the works of contemporaries. Hence the dilemma: one either does not care about being fashionable, or one is fashionable and just learns to mimic some knowledge about the classics. As time develops this rift just becomes bigger, because the amount of books written grows and grows to insane proportions. Conclusion: one can only be hip in the future if one does not read at all, which is a phenomenon I am already witnessing in the media.

It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with all your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them.

Much, maybe too much, has been written about literature.

Those who lead a literary life seem old when they're young and young when they're old, but they're never actually either. Like a good book, they are bound by neither category nor time.

This is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

[T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.

Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no character is created equal. One or two of them get all the breaks; the rest exist to get them to the finish line.

I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.

Dear Natasha,It's the middle of the night. I can't sleep. Thoughts are creeping through my head like darkness slips around the bodies of sky scrapers in every city we've ever been to. From the bottom up, suffocating the life on the street first and then raising to the head and the brain, circling into smog and clouds until the black stretches up so high that nobody can even remember what the stars used to look like.This is how I feel when I lie awake and think of you. I miss you.

Children__ and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we get. I think that__ why so many adults read YA: we__e never done coming of age.