All Quotes By Tag: Literature

“Marie-Louise Mallet emphasizes the decreased control over the experience of listening as opposed to looking:To look is to choose one’s point of view. [ . . . ] To listen is to be “touched” without ever being able to touch what touches us, without being able to seize or retain it. [ . . . ] It is to hear what one listens to take its distance, lose itself like a fleeting echo. To listen is to not be able to maintain, to keep present. It is not being able to retain. It’s to not be able to come back. [ . . . ] What has been heard will be kept only in memory, that is, kept as lost, without ever assuring that we have heard well, without being able to reassure ourselves.”

“Sitting here I glance over my right shoulder at the little row of books, red and green and blue, which stand waiting for my hand, offering their accumulated riches. I think of the years that may be in store for me, and of all the pages I may turn.”

“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing–until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”

“It is vain futility to analyze the algebra of time.”

“It is futile to spend time telling stories about the fleetness of each day.”

“He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.”

“There is only as much space, only as much time, Only as much desire, only as many words, Only as many pages, only as much ink To accept all of us at light-speed Hurrying into the Promised Land Of oblivion that is waiting for us sooner or later.”

“Without space, there is no time.”

“Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time.”

“Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.”

“If religion is true, one must believe. And if one chooses not to believe, one’s choice is marked under the category of a refusal, and is thus never really free: it has the duress of a recoil.” With literary belief, however, “one is always free to choose not to believe.” This, Wood argues, is the freedom of literature; it is what constitutes its “reality.”

“[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.”

“Current “literature” [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution.”

“If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.”

“And speaking of this wonderful machine:[840] I’m puzzled by the difference betweenTwo methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind,A testing of performing words, while heIs soaping a third time one leg, and B,The other kind, much more decorous, whenHe’s in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought,The abstract battle is concretely fought.The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar[850] A canceled sunset or restore a star,And thus it physically guides the phraseToward faint daylight through the inky maze.But method A is agony! The brainIs soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the willCan interrupt, while the automatonIs taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before.”