Literature

"When you look for the motivations you always go to the basic instincts, to the basic emotions, the basic things that have moved humankind always. That's what all writers write about, ultimately. What did Shakespeare write about? Jealousy, love, sex, power, greed, the same stuff that soap operas and the Bible are made of. It's always the same."

"Writing is like training to be an athlete. There is a lot of training and work that nobody sees in order to compete. The writer needs to write every day, just as the athlete needs to train. Much of the writing will never be used, but it is essential to do it. I always tell my young students to write at least one good page a day. At the end of the year they will have at least 360 good pages. That is a book."

"The written word is an act of human solidarity. I write so that people will love each other more."

"Writing is a terrible way to make a living, almost as bad as criticism."

"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."

"Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent."

"I am a galley slave to pen and ink."

"When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children. For aside from my evident inability to do anything "great," I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp which, when caught, is not worth the possession; but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one's heart and brings its own reward."

"The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps."

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."

"When that passage was written only God and Robert Browning understood it. Now only God understands it."

"SCRIBBLER, n. A professional writer whose views are antagonistic to one's own."

"These two rules make the best system: first, have something to say; second, say it."

"So I had this problem—work or starve. So I thought I'd combine the two and decided to become a writer."

"A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

"The personal essay is vulnerable. It cannot stand upon its footnotes."

"That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters."

"The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood."

"Oh that I had the art of easy writing What should be easy reading! could I scale Parnassus, where the Muses sit inditing Those pretty poems never known to fail, How quickly would I print (the world delighting) A Grecian, Syrian, or Assyrian tale; And sell you, mix'd with western sentimentalism, Some sample of the finest Orientalism."

"I've half a mind to tumble down to prose, But verse is more in fashion—so here goes!"

"A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one."

"In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded."

"Writing is a lonely occupation at best. Of course there are stimulating and even happy associations with friends and colleagues, but during the actual work of creation the writer cuts himself off from all others and confronts his subject alone. He moves into a realm where he has never been before — perhaps where no one has ever been. It is a lonely place, even a little frightening."

"The proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters."

"My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those who break down in the prison holes of despair."

"Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver."

"L'écrivain original n'est pas celui qui n'imite personne, mais celui que personne ne peut imiter."

"Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them."

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."

"In its focus on beauty, cursive handwriting is an activity more formative to what parents hope for their children than any single standardized test could be. It uplifts a work-a-day practice like writing and recording into a transcendent good. Content mastery is essential, of course, but cursive instills in students an appreciation of craftsmanship and the importance of taking pride in appearance."

"The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer."

"Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them. Coming from where I come from, with the history I have having spent the first twelve years of my life under both dictatorships…this is what I've always seen as the unifying principle among all writers. This is what, among other things, might join Albert Camus and Sophocles to Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Osip Mandelstam, and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Ralph Waldo Ellison. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, a future that we may have yet to dream of, someone may risk his or her life to read us."

"To outsiders, teaching writing might seem like leading students through endless punctuation exercises. It’s not. In reality, a postsecondary writing classroom is a place where students develop higher-order skills like formulating (and continuously fine-tuning) a persuasive argument, finding relevant sources, and integrating compelling evidence. But they also extend to essential beneath-the-surface abilities like finding ideas worth writing about in the first place and then figuring out how to organize and structure those ideas."

"If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum."

"Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale—who writes always to the unknown friend."

"Good typography should be like like a wonderful clear crystal goblet that holds wine. [It is] much better than a golden goblet with jewels on the outside because the point of the crystal goblet is that you can see the wine that is inside. You can appreciate the colors of it. You can see how when you swirl the wine how the texture of the wine clings to the glass and how quickly it drips down back into the pool of wine. And you can see the sediment in the bottom when you hold it up in the light. That's the purpose of typography. It should be invisible."

"You can gather however that I know I am not a real artist, and at the same time am fearfully serious over my work and willing to sweat at atmosphere if it helps me do what I want. What I want, I think, is the sentimental, but the sentimental reached by no easy beaten track—I cannot explain myself properly, for you must remember (I forget it myself) that though 'clever' I have a small and cloudy brain, and cannot clear it by talking or reading philosophy."

"As for 'story' I never yet did enjoy a novel or play in which someone didn't tell me afterward that there was something wrong with the story, so that's going to be no drawback as far as I'm concerned. "Good Lord, why am I so bored"—"I know; it must be the plot developing harmoniously." So I often reply to myself, and there rises before me my special nightmare—that of the writer as craftsman, natty and deft."

"You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it."

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."

"Writers live in houses other people built."

"If nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners. I read the writing when the hostilities broke out. But I had not the courage to say the word. God has given me the courage to say it before it is too late."

"May God give power to every word of mine. In his name I began to write this, and in His name I close it."

"Effective writing isn’t in the mechanics. Anyone can master the mechanical act of stringing together words and sentences and paragraphs to make a character move from A to B. The bookstores are full of evidence. But that’s not writing. Writing isn’t about the words, it’s about the experience. It’s about the feeling that the story creates inside of you. If there’s no feeling, there’s no story. But sometimes, there’s only the feeling without any meaning or understanding. And that’s not a story either."

"[Writing is] a bit like shitting...if it's coming in dribs and drabs or not coming at all, or being forced out, or if you're missing the rhythm, it's no pleasure at all."

"I could only see myself making a living through writing, as I had done in China. But should I write in Chinese here, a foreign land, or enrol in a language class and study English grammar? If I continued to write in Chinese I would have no readers here. Besides, I would never create a community of fellow artists and thinkers in my Western life while speaking Chinese."

"Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment."

"Good writers indulge their audience; great writers know better."

"The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publishers and the readers can and will follow."

"I always feel you're writing the book you couldn't find, so you have to write it yourself."

"I don’t think about rules when I’m writing – that’s the great thing about writing: it’s the one place in my life that I can do whatever I want."

"Intellectually as well as emotionally he (Nietzsche) needed solitude. This fact emerges, I believe, from the manner of thinking and style of writing revealed in his books, which are essentially a species of talking to oneself. … He is a man whose mind is full, overfull, of ideas; he is constantly finding ways of expressing them which, as he says in his letters, surprise and delight him; he spends much of each day walking, and at night he sits crouched over his table; and all the time he is talking to himself. He loves his own company, for with no one else can he enjoy such entertaining conversation. Sometimes he contradicts himself, but what would conversation be without contradiction? He argues, he grows angry, he laughs at himself; he postures and exposes himself as a posturer; he announces he is the freest of free-thinkers, and retorts that free-thinking is mere destructiveness. Gradually a philosophy emerges, his philosophy: none of it is of any use to anyone, no one is even interested in it; but one day — so he tells himself — mankind will open its eyes and see that a new world has been discovered."

"He wins every hand who mingles profit with pleasure, by delighting and instructing the reader at the same time."

"murderous signs, scratched in a folded tablet, and many of them too, enough to kill a man."

"There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature."

"If it was easy, everyone would do it rather than going around telling you their ideas and saying how they could be a writer if they had the time."

"Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker."

"The present writer ... writes because for him it is a luxury that becomes all the more enjoyable and conspicuous the fewer who buy and read what he writes."

"For me, writing is an act of reciprocity with the world; it is what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me."

"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair — the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page."

"The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful."

"A preface is a species of literary luxury, where an author, like a lover, is privileged to be egotistical."

"I have been writing all my life, and even now I do not understand the faculty of composition; but this I do know, that the history of the circumstances under which most books are written would be a frightful picture of human suffering. How often is the pen taken up when the hand is unsteady with recent sickness, and bodily pain is struggled against, and sometimes in vain! How often is the page written hurriedly and anxiously,—the mind fevered the while by the consciousness that it is not doing justice to its powers!"

"Advice to writers: Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin."

"A writer is like God. He can destroy empires, create new universes."

"He is no parasite on anything, whose work is real: a mechanic, a doctor, a builder, a tailor, a dishwasher. What, in comparison, does a writer produce? Semblances. This is a serious occupation?"

"I love physics, but what was even more important to me was leading a creative life ... And I knew that writers could continue doing their best work later in life.”"

"If I may, I would at this point urge young writers not to be too much concerned with the vagaries of the marketplace. Not everyone can make a first-rate living as a writer, but a writer who is serious and responsible about his work, and life, will probably find a way to earn a decent living, if he or she writes well. A good writer will be strengthened by his good writing at a time, let us say, of the resurgence of ignorance in our culture. I think I have been saying that the writer must never compromise with what is best in him in a world defined as free."

"I have written almost all my life. My writing has drawn, out of a reluctant soul, a measure of astonishment at the nature of life. And the more I wrote well, the better I felt I had to write. In writing I had to say what had happened to me, yet present it as though it had been magically revealed. I began to write seriously when I had taught myself the discipline necessary to achieve what I wanted. When I touched that time, my words announced themselves to me. I have given my life to writing without regret, except when I consider what in my work I might have done better. I wanted my writing to be as good as it must be, and on the whole I think it is. I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one's fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing: The men and things of today are wont to lie fairer and truer in tomorrow's meadow, Henry Thoreau said. I don't regret the years I put into my work. Perhaps I regret the fact that I was not two men, one who could live a full life apart from writing; and one who lived in art, exploring all he had to experience and know how to make his work right; yet not regretting that he had put his life into the art of perfecting the work."

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

"Premeditated details arrive, when you're writing, and my instinct is always to reach for the nearest weapon."

"A rule says "You must do it this way". A principle says, "This works... and has through all remembered time." The difference is crucial. Your work needn't be modeled after the well-made play; rather it must be well made within the principles that shape our art. Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form."

"I turned to writing full time in my middle fifties, in part to learn a few of those many things one never has time for in a conventional career … I enjoy trying to write simply, freshly and directly about subjects that specialized experts tend to deal with in jargon."

"If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism. If you steal from two, it's research."

"Sadly, reading and writing are, at least in part, the victims of a television and internet culture that has effectively encumbered the minds of people. This is problematic because, without reading, it becomes difficult to think analytically and imaginatively about the world’s problems and issues, and it hampers the development of appropriate responses and solutions. Lack of reading also often results in the uncritical acceptance of political slogans which, while they appear plausible, are ultimately devoid of merit."

"The reason I got into magic was that it seemed to be what was lying at the end of the path of writing. If I wanted to continue on that path, I was going to have to get into that territory because I had followed writing as far as I thought I could without taking a step over the edges of rationality. The path led out of rational confines. When you start thinking about art and creativity, rationality is not big enough to contain it all."

"I don’t distinguish between magic and art. When I got into magic, I realised I had been doing it all along, ever since I wrote my first pathetic story or poem when I was twelve or whatever. This has all been my magic, my way of dealing with it."

"You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style."

"You ask me why I do not write something....I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results."

"Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art."

"I write what I would like to read – what I think other women would like to read. If what I write makes a woman in the Canadian mountains cry and she writes and tells me about it, especially if she says ‘I read it to Tom when he came in from work and he cried too,’ I feel I have succeeded."

"When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

"The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects."

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

"what’s a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads—writers have always done that. If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that’s all. I think men can write about women and women can write about men. The whole point is to know the facts. Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality."

"The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write."

"You can’t write without a lot of pressure. Sometimes the pressure comes from anger, which then changes into a pressure to write...The pressure from anger is an energy that can be violent or useful or useless. Also the pressure doesn’t have to be anger. It could be love. One could be overcome with feelings of lifetime love or justice."

"I think a lot of what influences a writer is what you hear in the street, the language you hear, the way people talk, the way, the rhythms, the song, the language of your childhood."

"I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

"GR: What advice do you give writers?"

"Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility."

"In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid."

"Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd."

"To write something long, sophisticated, and coherent means, at least in part, to become more complex, articulate, and deeper in personality."

"Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing."

"Strength of creative writing lies in the skill of handling words and articulating artistic expression of feelings."

"In influencing write-ups, words seem to move despite residing still on paper."

"When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing."

"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance. As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance."

"Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found."

"Good authors too, who once knew better words, now only use four-letter words writing prose, anything goes!"

"Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness – when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven’t had time to know how much better it ought to be."

"Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries."

"I have collected all the writings of the Empire and burnt those which were of no use."

"We should not write so that it is possible for [the reader] to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us."

"Ethelfreda blinked in surprise. “How did you...” “Know that you're a writer?” When Ethelfreda nodded, Mrs. Gotti said, “You have that pale, physically unfit, financially desperate, and emotionally downtrodden look about you. It’s unmistakable. Only writers ever look like that.”"

"The things you remember have no form. When you write about them, you have to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. To give life shape—that is what a writer does. That is what is so difficult."

"... I think writing is one of the most pleasurable things one can do. It can be a private thing ... many hours alone in a room typing away, or sometimes racking one's brain to think of things to write. But it is also something that we can share."

"what is writing if not a form of confession in disguise? No matter what the subject, all literary roads lead back to the self. The writer descends like a miner into the deepest shafts of her soul in order to unearth the blackest coals of her torment, or to retrieve the most glittering diamonds of her memories, and bring them back to the surface in the form of fictions that she wishes to share with the world."

"I was never a Sunday scribbler. Writing was never a hobby for me, a pastime to while away the hours. On the contrary, it was as necessary to me as life itself; it was a refuge, a substitute for living, a confrontation with myself, a form of confession - but always it was a necessity that allowed me to feel that my life had an accompanying motif, an underlying melody. Writing often gave me moments of such ecstasy as can only be experienced by lovers; it gave me instances of such intense spiritual forgetfulness that I truly believed that I and the cosmos were one, so that through the simple act of breathing the air in my room I felt that I was inhaling the universe itself. Clasped within the bosom of this universe, my physical self simply ceased to be. Rare moments these, but blessed."

"And lo, though I travel through the valley of the archetypes, I shall fear no evil, for I know that the author can't kill me off for at least another 150 pages, no matter how stupid or trite I become, or he ruins the book."

"I felt that writing for bread would soon have stifled my genius and destroyed my talents, which were more those of the heart than of the pen, and arose solely from a proud and elevated manner of thinking, which alone could support them."

"I have always felt that the position of an author is not and cannot be distinguished and respectable, except in so far as it is not a profession. It is too difficult to think nobly, when one thinks in order to live. In order to be able and to venture to utter great truths, one must not be dependent on success."

"The need of success … might have made me strive to say what might please the multitude, rather than what was true and useful, and instead of a distinguished author which I might possibly become, I should have ended in becoming nothing but a mere scribbler."

"The bottom line is, I have to write the story I want to write. I never wrote them with a focus group of 8-year-olds in mind. I have to continue telling the story the way I want to tell it. I don't at all relish the idea of children in tears, and I absolutely don't deny it's frightening. But it's supposed to be frightening! And if you don't show how scary that is, you cannot show how incredibly brave Harry is."

"I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that tempting as it may be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing and much to do with life. And life, my definition, is not an intrusion."

"Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them."

"Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature."

"Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull."

"Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well."

"People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two."

"Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each other's fur."

"The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."

"Here's a statement made recently by a man who feels that women writers are quite different from men writers: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think it is unequal to me.” He talked about something called “feminine tosh”. He didn't mean it in an unkind way, he added. He said this is because of women's “sentimentality, their narrow view of the world . . . And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing, too”."

"Reading and writing are two essential skills of learning — gateway skills. Our K-12 schools and universities had better get them right. Reading opens up worlds. Writing changes worlds. We only speak as well as we write and think. We only write as well as we read. …Images quickly disappear. A shot on the TV screen lasts three to eight seconds. Writing doesn’t vaporize. There is something lasting about it. It’s been said that if you want to extend your life, write and leave something worth reading. …There will always be room for and need for great writers."

"S/he who writes, writes. In uncertainty, in necessity. And does not ask whether s/he is given the permission to do so or not. Yet, in the context of today’s market-dependent societies, “to be a writer” can no longer mean purely to perform the act of writing. For a laywo/man to enter the priesthood—the sacred world of writers—s/he must fulfill a number of unwritten conditions. S/he must undergo a series of rituals, be baptized and ordained. S/he must submit her writings to the law laid down by the corporation of literary/literacy victims and be prepared to accept their verdict. Every woman who writes and wishes to become established as a writer has known the taste of rejection."

"Good writing is thus differentiated from bad writing through a building up of skill and vocabulary and a perfecting of techniques. Since genius cannot be acquired, sophisticated means, skills, and knowledge are dangled before one’s eyes as the steps to take, the ladder to climb if one wishes to come any closer to the top of this monument known as Literature. Invoke the Name. Follow the norms. Of. The Well Written. The master-servant’s creed carries on: you must learn through patience and discipline. And what counts most is what it costs in labor to engender a work, hence the parallel often abusively drawn between the act of writing and the birth process."

"To write is to become. Not to become a writer (or a poet), but to become, intransitively. Not when writing adopts established keynotes or policy, but when it traces for itself lines of evasion."

"It is said that the writer’s choice is always a two-way choice. Whether one assumes it clear-sightedly or not, by writing one situates oneself vis-à-vis both society and the nature of literature, that is to say, the tools of creation. The way I encounter or incorporate the former, in other words, is the way I confront merge into the latter, for these are the two inseparable faces of a single entity. Neither entirely personal nor purely historical, a mode of writing is in itself a function. An act of historical solidarity, it denotes, in addition to the writer’s personal standpoint and intention, a relationship between creation and society. Dealing exclusively with either one of these two aspects, therefore, proves vain as an approach. So does the preaching of revolution through a writing more concerned with imposing than raising consciousness regarding the process by which language works or regarding the nature, activity, and status of writing itself. No radical change can occur as long as writing is not recognized, precisely, as “the choice of that social area within which the writer elects to situate the Nature of her/his language.”"

"Writing as a system by itself has its own rules and structuring process. The abc lesson says that for letters to become words and for words to take on meanings, they must relate to other letters, to other words, to the context in which they evolve—be it verbal or nonverbal—as well as to other present and absent contexts. (Words are think-tanks loaded with second- and third-order memories that die hard despite their ever-changing meanings.) Thus, writing constantly refers to writing, and no writing can ever claim to be “free” of other writings."

"When asked why they write, writers usually answer that they do so to create a world of their own, make order out of chaos, heighten their awareness of life, transcend their existences, discover themselves, communicate their feelings, or speak to others. Some add that they write as they breathe, as they stay alive, or as “birds sing,” to unfold “the comings and goings of a desire” and “exhaust a task that bears in itself its own bliss.” At times Writing is considered as a substitute for something lying beyond it, at other times as a necessity and an activity in its own right, devoid of any ulterior motive or any finality."

"Writing necessarily refers to writing. The image is that of a mirror capturing only the reflections of other mirrors. [...] Writing reflects. It reflects on other writings and, whenever awareness emerges, on itself as writing. Like the Japanese boxes that contain other boxes, nest one inside the other ad nihilum, writing is meshing one’s writing with the machinery of endless reflexivity. Footprints of emptiness multiplied to infinity in an attempt at disarming death."

"Writing, for the majority of us who call ourselves writers, still consists of “expressing” the exalted emotions related to the act of creating and either appropriating language to ourselves or ascribing it to a subject who is more or less a reflection of ourselves."

"Writing, in a way, is listening to the others’ language and reading with the others’ eyes. The more ears I am able to hear with, the farther I see the plurality of meaning and the less I lend myself to the illusion of a single message."

"Writing, like a game that defies its own rules, is an ongoing practice that may be said to be concerned, not with inserting a “me” into language, but with creating an opening where the “me” disappears while “I” endlessly come and go, as the nature of language requires. To confer an Author on a text is to close the writing. Eureka! It makes sense! This is it! I hold the key to the puzzle! Fear and seek. Fear and seek. The danger we fear most is forgetting to fear. Seek and lose. Lose, freely. When you are silent, it speaks; when you speak, it is silent. Writing is born when the writer is no longer."

"Writing as an inconsequential process of sameness/otherness is ceaselessly re-breaking and re-weaving patterns of ready-mades. The written bears the written to infinity."

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."

"You don't really understand your thoughts until you express them in words."

"Writers take words seriously — perhaps the last professional class that does — and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader."

"Did you ever think? Old-fashioned writing is the ultimate in context tagging. It’s passive, informative, and present exactly where you need it."

"Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another. The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbor's, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all."

"I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"

"In 1966 I was installed as a at , to teach '.' In my opening address I warned my students that creative writing could not be taught; the most I could do was to tell them what being a professional writer meant. ... One cannot be taught how to write. One teaches oneself by writing."

"The effort of expression has a bearing not only on the form but on the thought and on the whole inner being. So long as bare simplicity of expression is not attained, the thought has not touched or even come near to true greatness. … The real way of writing is to write as we translate. When we translate a text written in some foreign language, we do not seek to add anything to it; on the contrary, we are scrupulously careful not to add anything to it. That is how we have to try to translate a text which is not written down."

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone."

"A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content. A certain amount of encouragement is necessary.""

"I am more or less familiar with the works of the members of this Institute. I have worked in the same field. I have felt that quick comradeship of letters which is a very real comradeship, because it is a comradeship of thought and of principle."

"I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person."

"The imaginative artist willy-nilly influences his time. If he understands his responsibility and acts on it—taking the art seriously always, himself never quite—he can make a contribution equal to, if different from, that of the scientist, the politician, and the jurist. The anarchic artist so much in vogue now—asserting with vehemence and violence that he writes only for himself, grubbing in the worst seams of life—can do damage. But he can also be so useful in breaking up obsolete molds, exposing shams, and crying out the truth, that the broadest freedom of art seems to me necessary to a country worth living in."

"Here she drew forth a small pocket-book, took from it a card and a pencil and, after meditating a moment, wrote a few words. It is our privilege to look over her shoulder, and if we exercise it we may read the brief query: [...]."

"The hero [of a narrative] must be male, regardless of the gender of the text-image, because the obstacle, whatever its personification, is morphologically female....The hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter. And remember, the universe should always be considered a whole-sort-of-general-mish-mash."

"Narrating incredible things as though they were real—old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible—the new."

"Philology, especially in Germany, no longer partakes of the larger perspectives on scholarly inquiry as a whole."

"I hope I have shown that the fictitious unities of race and nation whipped up by philologists, anthropologists, historians, and social scientists of the nineteenth century as alternatives to the antique political state led them to forget a very important past and to invent in its place novel forms of governance that were pursued with vengeance and arrogance and all the cunning skill of the fore-thinkers."

"As poacher turned gamekeeper, C.S. Lewis found himself having to drill students in the elements of Old English philology."

"Philology reigned as king of the sciences, the pride of the first great modern universities—those that grew up in Germany in the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. Philology inspired the most advanced humanistic studies in the United States and the United Kingdom in the decades before 1850 and sent its generative currents through the intellectual life of Europe and America. It meant far more than the study of old texts. Philology referred to all studies of language, of specific languages, and (to be sure) of texts. Its explorations ranged from the religion of ancient Israel through the lays of medieval troubadours to the tongues of American Indians—and to rampant theorizing about the origin of language itself."

"A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style."

"The influence of German and European philology may be seen in the genealogical lines of early American Sanskrit which crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic: Edward Salisbury studied with Bopp in Berlin, Lassen in Bonn and de Sacy and Burnouf in Paris; Salisbury's student Whitney trained with Bopp and Weber in Berlin, and Roth in Tübingen; Whitney's student Lanman in Tübingen, Berlin and Leipzig."

"Philologists, who chase A panting syllable through time and space, Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark."

"Philology always leads to crime."

"Among us, the so-called "higher criticism," which reigns supreme in the domain of philology has also taken possession of our historical literature. This higher criticism has been the pretext for introducing all the anti-historical monstrosities that a vain imagination could suggest. Here we have the other method of making the past a living reality; putting subjective fancies in the place of historical data; fancies whose merit is measured by their boldness, that is, the scantiness of the particulars on which they are based, and the peremptoriness with which they contravene the best established facts of history."

"For the new theory of Language has unquestionably produced a new theory of Race. . . . There seems to me no doubt that modern philology has suggested a grouping of peoples quite unlike anything that had been thought of before. If you examine the bases proposed for common nationality before the new knowledge growing out of the study of Sanscrit had been popularised in Europe, you will find them extremely unlike those which are now advocated and even passionately advocated in parts of the Continent. . . . That peoples not necessarily understanding one another's tongue should be grouped together politically on the ground of linguistic affinities assumed to prove community of descent, is quite a new idea."

"Philologists appear to me to be a secret society who wish to train our youth by means of the culture of antiquity · I could well understand this society and their views being criticised from all sides. A great deal would depend upon knowing what these philologists understood by the term "culture of antiquity"—If I saw, for example, that they were training their pupils against German philosophy and German music, I should either set about combating them or combating the culture of antiquity, perhaps the former, by showing that these philologists had not understood the culture of antiquity."

"To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology."

"Now the philosophy of life, in its highest range at least, is a divine science of experience. This experience, however, is throughout internal and spiritual. It is therefore easily conceivable that it can enter readily and easily into all other experimental sciences, and into those especially which more immediately relate to man, as, for instance, most of the branches of natural history, and still more into philology, with which at present we are most immediately concerned. And this it does, in order to borrow such illustrations and comparisons as may tend to elucidate or further to develop its own subject-matter, or else to furnish applications to individual cases in other departments of life. However, in thus proceeding, philosophy must take heed lest it overpass its own proper limits or forget its true end and aim. It must not go too deeply into particulars, or lose itself among the specialities of the other sciences. On the contrary, it ought carefully to confine itself to those points which more immediately concern man, and especially the inner man, and, adhering to the meaning and spirit of the whole, seek to elucidate and throw out this pre-eminently."

"BALD heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love's despair To flatter beauty's ignorant ear. All shuffle there; all cough in ink; All wear the carpet with their shoes; All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbour knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?"

"He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man"

"She's a dwelling place for demons She's a cage for every unclean spirit, Every filthy bird and makes us drink The poisoned wine to fornicating with our kings Fallen now is Babylon the Great"

"Here's a story about the boys at the altar Some of them came between me and my halter But I don't think the good lord would mind I was callin' his name the whole time!"

"Cuz I'm a freaky streaker like Winnie the Pooh / T-shirt and no pants and I dance the boogaloo!"

"I never thought children could be so sexy. Did I say that out loud? Oh well I love the Maxi never found that I could be one of the people who love me like everything else baby just hold my hand until we f to be fair until we find oh never come back to the start to be with one oh you know I will always be the one to be with you today love you I know right now maybe sexy but this body is tea oh tea yeah the body is sexy you know that right but wait I just do that I'm now but nobody okay good cuz I know that won't never get cuz I know that will never be good uh come and get the food of the kitchen and I love it ooh that could you will be um tonight oh go go make this is it to be right ready already did you see that like oh can you see that her body so tea every girl one thing to be wait didn't you say I uh wait oh I forgot to say that I'm going to be the one who have that kind of take your time to come finish that is that you had before dinner cuz I know that it won't be the one who I love it baby come hold back beautiful face summer composer beautiful ice cream on the table oh baby"

"These are the words you wish you wrote down"

"I swam across, I jumped across for you."

"You've got that rainbow feel, but the rainbow has a beard"

"I'll wait in this place, where the shadows run from themselves."

"And I'm standing at the crossroads, believe I'm sinking down."

"He was high on intellectualism. I've never been there, but the brochure looks nice."

"If it makes you happy, it can't be that bad. If it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad?"

"It's not getting what you want It's wanting what you've got"

"Tell your daughters, "Do not walk the streets alone tonight!"

"Look for me when the sun-bright swallow Sings upon the birch bough high."

"Meet me on my vast veranda My sweet untouched Miranda"

"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

"You can spend all your time making love/You can spend all your love making time"

"He can't even run his own life, I'll be damned if he'll run mine."

"I love it when you call, I love it when you call/I love it when you call but you never call at all"

"[to "American Tune" by Paul Simon ] This pretty tune was written by Hans Leo Hassler In 1599. I wrote some words and changed about three notes. Now ASCAP says it's mine."

"[to a tune similar to "You Can Call Me Al" by Paul Simon] I'm well aware that there's an element you could call exploitation In the way that I appropriate the cultures of these peoples for my own commercial purposes. Mmm, but everyone who works for me gets credit And royalties And Grammys And a chance to ride to stardom on my coattails, neh-nyah neh-nyah. But hey, let's just remember who's the genius here!"

"Between the lines of fear and blame, You begin to wonder why you came. Where did I go wrong? I lost a friend Somewhere along in the bitterness. And I would have stayed up with you all night, Had I known how to save a life."

"I said, "Hi!" She said, "Yeah, I guess I am.""

"Wouldn't it be great if no one ever got offended? And wouldn't it be great to say what's really on your mind? I have always said all the rules are made for bendin' And if I let my hair down, would that be such a crime?"

"Won't you die tonight for love? Baby join me in death. Won't you die?"

"All in, all in a day A day it changes everything"

"It's just a ride, it's just a ride No need to run, no need to hide It'll take you round and round Sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down It's just a ride, it's just a ride Don't be scared, don't hide your eyes It may feel so real inside But don't forget it's just a ride"

"He's washing dishes and baby clothes He's so ambitious, he even sews But don't forget, folks, that's what you get, folks For makin' whoopee"

"If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life Never make a pretty woman your wife So for my personal point of view Get an ugly girl to marry you"

"I know what you must be saying to yourselves. If that's the way she feels about it, why doesn't she just end it all? Oh, no, not me. I'm not ready for that final disappointment. 'Cause I know, just as well as I'm standing here talking to you, That when that final moment comes and I'm breathing my last breath, I'll be saying to myself… Is that all there is?"

"The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain!"

"I swore I would love you till the end of time. So now, I'm prayin' for the end of time..."

"I'll be thuggin forever, see I'ma fighter, not a lover I'm a hit-and-run-it, cold-blooded, motherfucka"

"Your life's an open book Don't close it fore it's done"

"Staying awake to chase a dream"

"Sex is natural, sex is good; not everybody does it, but everybody should."

"This is how we like to do it in the murder scene."

"Becoming perfect as if they were sterling silver chainsaws going cascading..."

"They're coming to take me away Ho ho, hee hee, ha ha To the funny farm Where life is beautiful all the time And I'll be happy to see Those nice young men in their clean white coats"

"I'll be back when I've calmed my fears And I'll see you around in a thousand years"

"Talking is just masturbating without the mess."

"Scared the lights'll turn green You'll have to be seen You'll be like anybody else Scared the lights'll turn red You're stuck in your head You can't run it to even her How you gonna get through the year?"

"It's just fuck and run Fuck and run Ever since I was 17 Even when I was 12"

"I want to be your Blowjob Queen"

"In wine there's truth but in silence there's surrender."

"This is ourselves under pressure"

"You're still searching for these answers They're not inside your wrist"

"I never wanted to know Never wanted to see I wasted my time Till time wasted me I never wanted to go I always wanted to stay 'Cause the persons I am Are the parts that I play So I plot and I plan And I hope and I scheme To the lure of a night Filled with unfinished dreams And I'm holding on tight To a world gone astray As they charge me for years I can't pay"

"I am the way I am the light I am the dark inside the night I hear your hopes I feel your dreams And in the dark I hear your screams Don't turn away Just take my hand And when you make your final stand I'll be right there, I'll never leave And all I ask of you is... Believe"

"I did it my way."

"If the kids are united they will never be divided."

"There are things in Doris's life, but then there are in everyone's. She opens her little mouth, She sings her little song. Like a flag it folds out across the city, and it goes: "The old man becomes an ice-skater... A maniac becomes a stepfather... I watch a policeman's mouth - out comes an honest word." Miracles happen when Doris sings. Couples in love stop dead in their tracks. Dishes clatter to the ground unbroken. Politicians die."

"Be careful how you touch her, for she'll awaken, And sleep's the only freedom that she knows."

"I'm not your star... Isn't that what you said, what you thought this song meant?"

"[If] you can't hide it, you might as well embrace it."

"'Cause we're all to blame We've gone too far From pride to shame, We're trying so hard, We're dying in vain, We want it all, Everyone, don't we all?"

"The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades."

"'The whole thing I think is sick.'"

"I never lov’d a book of horn, Nor leaves that have their letters worn; Nor with a fescue to direct me, Where every puny shall correct me."

"When little children first are brought to schoole A Horne-booke is a necessarie toole."

"Inadventurous, unstirred by impulses of practical ambition, I was capable of sitting twenty years teaching infants the horn-book, turning silk dresses and making children’s frocks."

"Nor let them fall under Discouragement, Who at their Horn-book stick, and time hath spent Upon that A, B, C, while others do Into their Primer, or their Psalter go."

"…if I keep sinking from one abyss of ignorance to another, with a velocity proportionable to what I have letely done, I must soon turn back to the first foundation of all human learning, a horn-book."

"…walked abroad with ferule and horn-book"

"Sir W.—“Come, come, let’s see, Man! What’s this! Odd! this Law is a plaguy troublesome thing; for, now a days, it won’t let a Man give away his own, without repeating the Particulars 500 times over: When in former times, a Man might have held his Title to Twenty Thousand pound a year, in compass of an Horn book.”"

"None but imprison’d children now Are seen, where dames with angry brow Threaten each younker to his seat, Who through the window, eyes the street; Or from his horn-book turns away, To mourn for liberty and play."

"I have taught my little master to know his letters and spell a little, as well as I could, out of my Bible; for they have given him neither horn-book nor primmer."

"Neatly secured from being soil’d or torn, Beneath a pane of thin translucent horn, A book (to please us at a tender age ’Tis call’d a book, though but a single page) Presents the prayer the Saviour deign’d to teach, Which children use, and parsons—when they preach."

"He resolved therefore to answere his humble orator; but being himselfe not brought up to learning (for the divell can neither write nor reade) yet he has been to all the vniversities in Christendom, and thrown damnable heresies (like bones for dogges to gnaw upon) amongst the doctors themselves; but hauing no skill but in his owne Horne-booke, it troubled his mind where he should get a pen-man fit for his tooth to scribe for him."

"Here The letters may be read, through the horn, That make the story perfect."

"Potentially— As every christened rogue’s a child of God, Or those old hags, Christ’s brides—Think of your horn-book— The world, the flesh, and the devil—a goodly leash!"

"And yet God made all three."

"Methinks, you and I should have been born under the same roof, sucked the same milk, conned the same horn-book, thumbed the same Testament together; for we have been more than sisters, Maria!"

"What other books there are in English of the kind of those above-mentioned, fit to engage the liking of children, and tempt them to read, I do not know; but am apt to think that children, being generally delivered over to the method of schools, where the fear of the rod is to enforce, and not any pleasure of the employment to invite them to learn; this sort of useful books, amongst the number of silly ones that are of all sorts, have yet had the fate to be neglected; and nothing that I know has been considered of this kind out of the ordinary road of the horn-book, primer, psalter, Testament, and Bible."

"I come not here to learn the horn-book of war…"

"No wonder that the horn-book is the despair of mothers!"

"Quan a chyld to scole xal set be, A bok hym is browt, Naylyd on a brede of tre, That men callyt an abece Pratylych i-wrout."

"Hearkens after prophecies and dreams; And from the cross-row plucks the letter G, And says a wizard told him that by G His issue disinherited should be."

"Yes, yes, he teaches boys the Horne-booke: What is Ab speld backward with the horn on its head."

"Lo! now with State she utters the Command, Eftsoons the Urchins to their Tasks repair: Their Books of Stature small they take in Hand, Which with pellucid horn secured are, To save from finger wet the Letters fair…"

"One day was allowed the child wherein to learn his letters; and each of them did in that time know all its letters, great and small, except Molly and Nancy, who were a day and a half before they knew them perfectly, for which I thought them very dull, but since I have observed how long many children are learning the horn-book I have changed my opinion."

"In discussions on pornography, a lot depends on the very definition of what is considered to be “pornographic” material. Pornography may be defined as (a) a moral wrong, (b) a moral good or (c) a non-moral issue. Thus, “the right to pornography” (as a “liberty”, not as a “claim-right”) may either be argued “because” it is amoral or non-moral good, or “although” it is a moral wrong. But whether one relates the notion of pornography intrinsically to (the showing/describing of) sexual acts, considered to be morally reprehensible, or uses a morally neutral or positive definition, one cannot escape the task of arguing what exactly makes (some or all) pornography a moral wrong or good."

"I once stole a pornographic book that was printed in Braille. I used to rub the dirty parts."

"Pornographic sex is a kind of sex that can be described. Which told you something, he felt, about pornography, and about sex. During Keith's time, sex divorced itself from feeling. Pornography was the industrialization of that rift."

"In this connection we may refer to fornicatory acts effected with artificial imitations of the human body, or of individual parts of that body. There exist true Vaucansons in this province of pornographic technology, clever mechanics who, from rubber and other plastic materials, prepare entire male or female bodies, which, as hommes or dames de voyage, subserve fornicatory purposes. More especially are the genital organs represented in a manner true to nature. Even the secretion of Bartholin's glans is imitated, by means of a "pneumatic tube" filled with oil. Similarly, by means of fluid and suitable apparatus, the ejaculation of the semen is imitated. Such artificial human beings are actually offered for sale in the catalogue of certain manufacturers of "Parisian rubber articles.""

"Sexual drives are core aspects of human functioning, but the quantity and quality of sexual behaviors show high variability across individuals. Pornography use has become a normative behavior among adults, and individuals show differences in quantity/frequency measures of consumption. Considering the broad spectrum of “normal” sexual behaviors and the finding that the number of people with NPHFU is 3–6 times larger than the number with PHFU, pornography use may be linked to adverse health measures in a minority of adults."

"Pornography has been so thickly glossed over with the patina of chic these days in the name of verbal freedom and sophisication… Part of the problem is that those who traditionally have been the most vigorous opponents of porn are often those same people who shudder at the explicit mention of any sexual subject… There can be no equality in porn, no female equivalent, no turning of the tables in the name of bawdy fun. Pornography, like rape, is a male invention, desgined to dehumanize women… Pornography is the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda."

"Listen, I'm no social scientist and haven't done a survey. I don't pretend to know what John Q citizen thinks about this. But I've lived in prison for a long time now and I've met a lot of men who were motived to commit violence just like me. And without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography. Without question, without exception. Deeply influenced and consumed by an addiction to pornography."

"Those of us who are, who have been so much influenced by violence in the media, in particular pornographic violence, are not some kinds of inherent monsters. We are your sons and we are your husbands. And we grew up in regular families. And pornography can reach out and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home twenty, thirty years ago."

"...well meaning decent people will condemn [the] behavior of a Ted Bundy while they're walking past a magazine rack full of the very kinds of things that send young kids down the road to be Ted Bundys."

"Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials."

"Horror and pornography are the only two genres specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation. They exist solely to horrify and stimulate, not always respectively, and their ability to do so is the sole measure of their success: they 'prove themselves upon our pulses""

"It was Raimondi who created the images for the first work of printed pornography, a book called "I Modi" (“The Positions” or “The Ways”), also known as "The Sixteen Pleasures" (or, if you’re into Latin, "De omnibus Veneris Schematibus"). As per the title, the book was built around engravings of 16 sexual positions, based on a lost series of paintings by Giulio Romano, Raphael’s pupil, which he had painted for Federico II Gonzaga, to decorate and provide inspiration at his Palazzo Te in Mantua (destroyed in 1630, during the War of Mantuan Succession)."

"...pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity–the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he's got her."

"[I]n the male sexual lexicon, which is the vocabulary of power, erotica is simply high-class pornography: better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer. As with the call girl and the streetwalker, one is turned out better but both are produced by the same system of sexual values and both perform the same sexual service."

"Pornography is used in rape - to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act."

"The pornographers actually use our bodies as their language. We are their speech. . . . Protecting what they 'say' means protecting what they do to us, how they do it. It means protecting their sadism on our bodies, because that is how they write: not like a writer at all; like a torturer."

"Men characterize pornography as something mental because their minds, their thoughts, their dreams, their fantasies, are more real to them than women's bodies or lives; in fact, men have used their social power to characterize a $10-billion-a-year trade in women as fantasy."

"Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance.""

"Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it."

"Everyone knows that child pornography is bad because it's been demonstrated over and over that people who look at that stuff end up acting it out—and really destroy people's lives. That's beyond the unconscionably cruel exploitation of the children involved. Other forms of pornography are harmful for a similarly oft-repeated reason: Pornography makes women into objects of desire rather than real people. We want to have relationships between person and person, not person-to-object."

"Monks, these two extremes ought not to be practiced by one who has gone forth from the household life. (What are the two?) There is addiction to indulgence of sense-pleasures, which is low, coarse, the way of ordinary people... and there is addiction to self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable. Avoiding both these extremes, the Tathagata (the Perfect One) has realized the Middle Path; it gives vision, gives knowledge, and leads to calm, to insight, to enlightenment and to Nibbana."

"Peter Griffin: What's the difference between art and pornography... a government grant!"

"In conjunction with prior literature, we conclude that there is little or no evidence of an association between mere pornography use and ED, consistent evidence of an association between self-reported problematic use and ED cross-sectionally, and no evidence of causal links between any pornography variables and ED."

"In the United States, Internet pornography use is a common behavior that has risen in popularity in recent years. The present study sought to examine potential relationships between pornography use and well-being, with a particular focus on individual perceptions of pornography use and feelings of addiction. Using a large cross-sectional sample of adults (N = 713), perceived addiction to Internet pornography predicted psychological distress above and beyond pornography use itself and other relevant variables (e.g., socially desirable responding, neuroticism). This model was replicated using a large cross-sectional sample of undergraduates (N = 1,215). Furthermore, a 1-year, longitudinal follow-up with a subset of this sample (N = 106) revealed a relationship between perceived addiction to Internet pornography and psychological distress over time, even when controlling for baseline psychological distress and pornography use. Collectively, these findings suggest that perceived addiction to Internet pornography, but not pornography use itself, is uniquely related to the experience of psychological distress."

"In 2019, my colleagues and I published a review of over 130 scientific studies of pornography use and motivation. We found that the most common reason people report for why they view pornography is sexual arousal. Research is abundantly clear that the majority of time that pornography is used, it is used as a part of masturbation."

"Despite the fact that, prior to COVID-19, 17 states introduced or passed legislation calling pornography use a public health crisis, public health professionals have argued that it really is not one, and I tend to agree. COVID-19, on the other hand, certainly is a public health crisis."

"Using an online sample of participants in committed relationships, support was found for a moderated mediation model in which depression mediated the relationship between pornography use and relationship satisfaction, and this indirect effect was moderated by level of moral disapproval. Results indicate that, among consumers of pornography, their level of moral disapproval exacerbates adverse intra- and interpersonal outcomes such as distress and decreased relationship satisfaction. These results extend the empirical literature that examines the conditional effects of moral disapproval of pornography use to relational outcomes."

"Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable. Propaganda is far more pornographic than a home video of two people fucking."

"The oppressive measures on pornography by the Korean government are totally insane... It is actually seen that it oppresses masculinity and that it distorts the essentials. It is all done by the Ministry of Gender Equality and women’s organizations led by Korean feminists."

"Though watching porn may seem degrading to some women, the fact is that it's one of the few jobs for women where you can get to a certain level, look around, and feel so powerful, not just in the work environment but as a sexual being. So, fuck Gloria Steinem."

"To this day, I can't watch my own sex scenes."

"In this study, we examined the unique contribution of pornography consumption to the longitudinal prediction of criminal recidivism in a sample of 341 child molesters. We specifically tested the hypothesis, based on predictions informed by the confluence model of sexual aggression that pornography will be a risk factor for recidivism only for those individuals classified as relatively high risk for re-offending. Pornography use (frequency and type) was assessed through self-report and recidivism was measured using data from a national database from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Indices of recidivism, which were assessed up to 15 years after release, included an overall criminal recidivism index, as well as subcategories focusing on violent (including sexual) recidivism and sexual recidivism alone. Results for both frequency and type of pornography use were generally consistent with our predictions. Most importantly, after controlling for general and specific risk factors for sexual aggression, pornography added significantly to the prediction of recidivism. Statistical interactions indicated that frequency of pornography use was primarily a risk factor for higher-risk offenders, when compared with lower-risk offenders, and that content of pornography (i.e., pornography containing deviant content) was a risk factor for all groups. The importance of conceptualizing particular risk factors (e.g., pornography), within the context of other individual characteristics is discussed."

"The current study adopted a participant-informed, “bottom-up,” qualitative approach to identifying perceived effects of pornography on the couple relationship. A large sample (N = 430) of men and women in heterosexual relationships in which pornography was used by at least one partner was recruited through online (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and offline (e.g., newspapers, radio, etc.) sources. Participants responded to open-ended questions regarding perceived consequences of pornography use for each couple member and for their relationship in the context of an online survey. In the current sample of respondents, “no negative effects” was the most commonly reported impact of pornography use. Among remaining responses, positive perceived effects of pornography use on couple members and their relationship (e.g., improved sexual communication, more sexual experimentation, enhanced sexual comfort) were reported frequently; negative perceived effects of pornography (e.g., unrealistic expectations, decreased sexual interest in partner, increased insecurity) were also reported, albeit with considerably less frequency. The results of this work suggest new research directions that require more systematic attention."

"Pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling."

"But the most obscene American phenomenon of all is the growth of commercialized sex and hard- and soft-core pornography. In the last decade, hardcore film and print porn, which features perversion, sadism, and masochism, has become a billion dollar business. It is a business which is not only tolerated, but defended by the press in the sacred name of “freedom of the press.” One would find it easier to believe in this noble reason for defending the filth that is flooding the nation if the newspapers did not reap such handsome profits from advertising and reviewing porn. In my view, newspaper publishers who carry X-rated ads are no better than pimps for the porn merchants. Billy Graham may have been exaggerating when he said “America has a greater obsession with sex than Rome ever had.” But he was not exaggerating very much."

"Men may buy pornography but women pay for it – in terms of exploitation, rape, violence, and a society that sees them as disposable sexual objects."

"Pornography? I've been looking at it all my life and it hasn't affected me anything."

"Before the advent of the internet and sexual videos, preadolescent and adolescent boys plotted a secret acquisition of Playboy magazines. They snuck peeks while adults weret watching and hid magazines under beds, in tree forts, and buried them in closets. Adolescent boys have always been fascinated with sex and nudity because curiosity is a part of their emerging sexuality. Such behavior is understandable, if not to be encouraged. But what might have titillated teenage boys when we were young is tame compared to what is available to them now. Women in Playboy magazines twenty or thirty years ago were alone. While they stared seductively at the viewer, they were not engaged in a sexual act. But Playboy over the last few decades has been nudged aside by more graphic magazines and other media. In 1985, 92 percent of adult males had a Playboy magazine by age fifteen. Today the average age of a boy's first exposure to pornography is eleven, and where he might once have seen only a naked woman, now he is much more likely to view sex acts between partners. Nearly half of boys between the third and eighth grades have visited Internet sites with "adult content." The more graphic the content, the more severe the trauma it inflicts on our boys. And we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that it is not traumatic. Pornography warps the natural development of sexuality in boys. It can lead them down paths of perversity that, in their normal development, they would never have otherwise considered. Young boys who view pornography are having their morality, their sense of what is acceptable, shaped by it. And the Internet is full of seducers ready to prey on them, including sexual predators. The problem isn't that many young boys seek pornography out of curiosity, but that pornography pops up at them unawares and drags them in."

"Research has shown that viewing pornography can be quite disturbing to boys and that viewing explicit sex changes the way boys behave sexually. For example, viewing sexual material (not just pornography) has been shown to make college students significantly more accepting of the use of aggression against women, both in a sexual and nonsexual manner. And contrary to what one might think, studies have shown that when college students recall memories of sexual media their memories are overwhelmingly negative. Their responses include (from most common to least common): disgust, shock, embarrassment, anger, fear, and sadness. Interestingly, sexual response to those viewings was very low."

"An overwhelming majority of parents I encounter shake their heads and smirk when discussing boys and sexual media. "Come on," they quip, "it's just sex after all. They're all interested; they're all going to try it." Such comments I'm afraid, reveal a profound ignorance about sex and boys. If we were truly interested in letting boys be boys, we would let them be just that- boys, not voyeurs lured into a dark underworld of pornography. If pornography did not exist, boys would not be out there creating it. It is adults who thrust it upon them. Sex is a big deal for boys. They are not naturally emotionally dull human beings, Boys are feeling, thinking, and spiritual beings, and a healthy sexuality is one that grows within that well-rounded framework. A healthy sexuality is not exercised too young, it is not artificially aroused and diverted, and it is not promiscuous. And deep down our boys know this, but we allow them to be pressured by the pornographers of pop culture. We shouldn't."

"I saw no reason why you couldn't create a work of pornography that adhered to all the same standards as the best art or literature. The big difference between art and pornography is that art, at its best, makes you feel less alone. You see a painting or read a piece of writing that expresses a thought that you had but didn't express, and you suddenly feel less alone. Pornography, on the other hand, tends to engender feelings of self-disgust, isolation and wretchedness. I wanted to change that."

"Pornography is such a degraded genre with absolutely no standards. It doesn’t serve any function other than to make people feel wretched, ashamed and alone. It reinforces our loneliness and our wretched human misery. And it shouldn’t."

"Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice."

"But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art."

"Pornography does not directly or imminently lead to death, infectious disease morbidity, property destruction, or population displacement. Research suggests that there may be adverse health consequences of pornography use for some, no substantial consequences for the majority, and positive effects for others. For example, for the minority predisposed to perpetrate sexual violence, viewing violent pornography may exacerbate risk. Additionally, individuals who frequently view pornography portraying risk behaviors (e.g., condomless sex) may be more likely to engage in them. Research on how pornography affects the cohesion and fidelity of relationships and sexual satisfaction is mixed, but the majority of users do not experience substantial problems. Importantly, death, infection, property destruction, and population displacement are not resulting from pornography use. And for some, pornography use is associated with health-promoting behaviors, including increased intimacy, “safer” sexual behaviors (e.g., solo masturbation), and feelings of acceptance."

"Calling something a “public health crisis” when it is not demonstrably so may result in unwarranted policy or funding shifts. For example, government agencies may spend money to convene experts for high-level meetings or require businesses and individuals to comply with unwarranted regulations. Moreover, pathologizing any form of sexual behavior, including pornography use, has the potential to restrict sexual freedom and to stigmatize, which is antithetical to public health. If the public health workforce wants to save its power to mobilize people when an acute threat is imminent, reserving the phrase “public health crisis” for strategic, select times is advisable."

"The story begins in the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks turned what was once the Rumyantsev arts museum into the country’s national library. As the newly named Lenin Library began amassing new literature, it also opened a rare book department to house compromising materials acquired primarily from confiscated noble libraries. One of the most stunning items seized from an unknown owner is The Seven Deadly Sins, an oversized book of engravings self-published in 1918 by Vasily Masyutin, who also illustrated classics by Pushkin and Chekhov. Among its depictions of gluttony is a large woman masturbating with a ghoulish smile. Before the revolution, it was fashionable among the upper classes to assemble so-called knigi dlya dam (Ladies’ Books) – a kind of bawdy scrapbook. An ostentatious leather-bound album with Kniga Dlya Dam embossed in gold on the cover opens to reveal a Chinese silk drawing of an entwined couple. Further on, dozens of engravings show aristocratic duos fornicating in sumptuously upholstered settings. Erotica was also consumed by Russia’s masses, as evidenced by a set of pamphlets from the 1910s. A pamphlet labeled Pikantnaya Biblioteka (Naughty Library), containing a tale from the 14th century Italian classic Decameron and a story titled A Consultation, sold for 50 kopeks. On the cover, a satanic figure grips a silky-tressed damsel in distress. In the 1930s, increasing control over books led to hundreds of new additions. Items deemed inappropriate now extended to Soviet writings on sexuality from the previous decade, when abortion was legalised and Alexandra Kollontai, the most famous woman in the Bolshevik government, called for the destruction of the traditional family — a movement reversed under Stalin."

"After Skorodumov’s death, the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, raided his collection. According to a letter sent by library director Vasily Olishev to the Council of Ministers, a post-mortem search of his apartment revealed a staggering 40,000 items, 1,763 of which were “books of an erotic nature” while 5,000 were “pornographic or vulgar” brochures and magazines. The Soviet state snapped up the collection from Skorodumov’s widow for 14,000 rubles, then a considerable sum. However, Olishev was careful to note that the money did not extend to the erotica. “The library did not deem it appropriate to pay citizen Burovaya [Skorodumov widow] for the erotic literature, broadsheets and magazines, as this literature presents neither scientific nor historical value to the library’s readers, and is an especially harmful vestige of bourgeois ideology,” he wrote. For just this reason, however, it was necessary to hang on to it: “The Lenin Library did not deem it appropriate to return literature of such a harmful nature to citizen Burovaya, as its possession in the home of a private citizen presents considerable danger.”"

"Gail Horalek, the mother of a 7th-grade child in Michigan in the US, has made international headlines by complaining that the unabridged version of Anne Frank's diary is pornographic and should not be taught at her daughter's school. At issue for Horalek is a section detailing Anne's exploration of her own genitalia, material originally omitted by Anne's father, Otto Frank, when he prepared the manuscript for publication in the late 40s."

"Pornography is material intended to arouse sexual excitement, and I very much doubt that was Anne's intention when she wrote to her imaginary confidant Kitty about her journeys of self-discovery."

"Nevertheless, consistent findings have emerged linking adolescent use of pornography that depicts violence with increased degrees of sexually aggressive behavior."

"Traditional factors that once explained men’s sexual difficulties appear insufficient to account for the sharp rise in erectile dysfunction, delayed ejaculation, decreased sexual satisfaction, and diminished libido during partnered sex in men under 40. This review (1) considers data from multiple domains, e.g., clinical, biological (addiction/urology), psychological (sexual conditioning), sociological; and (2) presents a series of clinical reports, all with the aim of proposing a possible direction for future research of this phenomenon. Alterations to the brain's motivational system are explored as a possible etiology underlying pornography-related sexual dysfunctions. This review also considers evidence that Internet pornography’s unique properties (limitless novelty, potential for easy escalation to more extreme material, video format, etc.) may be potent enough to condition sexual arousal to aspects of Internet pornography use that do not readily transition to real-life partners, such that sex with desired partners may not register as meeting expectations and arousal declines. Clinical reports suggest that terminating Internet pornography use is sometimes sufficient to reverse negative effects, underscoring the need for extensive investigation using methodologies that have subjects remove the variable of Internet pornography use. In the interim, a simple diagnostic protocol for assessing patients with porn-induced sexual dysfunction is put forth."

"Pornography. That which excites, whether from approval or disapproval."

"Sure, pornography is full of anti-feminist imagery, and women are often exploited in the making of it (though there's a growing movement towards ethically produced pornography, as Jones notes). But that this does not translate to the behavior of its users can be seen in another study from 2015, published in the Journal of Sex research. The study found that users of pornography held more egalitarian attitudes than non-users when it came to women in positions of power, women working outside the home, and even abortion. The study also found that those who did and those who did not indulge in pornography “did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward the traditional family and in their self-identification as feminist.”"

"When considering shunga, it is important to shed censorious attitudes towards sexuality that have been a fundamental part of western Christian culture for so long. Although printed shunga was officially illegal in Japan after 1722, it was widely tolerated – indeed, during the three centuries of its popularity many thousands of images were produced in a variety of formats: multi-volume books, bound albums sometimes exchanged as wedding gifts, painted handscrolls, and sets of small-format prints possibly sold in wrappers. Shunga could be sensuous and comic, but it was rarely violent or exploitative. Most shunga depicts vigorous heterosexual couples in mutual bliss – and these prints were likely cherished by men and women, both young and old, from different strata of society, including samurai lords as well as prosperous merchants and commoners. “The division between art and obscene pornography is a Western conception,” says Clark. “There was no sense in Japan that sex or sexual pleasure was sinful.”"

"Pornography is about dominance and often pain. Erotica is about mutuality and always pleasure."

"I can’t tell you how surrealistic it is to find myself and others called “puritanical”, “the new Victorians”, or “anti-sex” for the same views that got us condemned as “sexual libertarians” and “immoral women” until a few years ago. Women and men who oppose pornography for its normalization of violence will have to fight hard if we’re going to avoid the suffragists’ fate of being recorded in history as boring, asexual bluestockings... Depictions of mutual pleasure and the sexualization of equality are so rare that pornographers seem to have the franchise on sex. They can get away with claiming that to oppose pornography is to oppose sex… The answer to pornography lies not only in exposing it as an institution, but making sure that individuals who are drawn to it, but who are not hurting others, don’t feel condemned. It’s partly the feeling of being personally accused that has caused some women, including some feminists, to defend pornography."

"[I can't define what is pornography.] "But I know it when I see it.""

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of [hard-core pornography] material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

"Erotica: The depiction of naked men. Depictions of naked women are far less innocent and are known as "pornography"."

"What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I'm told."

"Not unlike urban gangs, police, carnival workers and certain other culturally marginalized guilds, the US porn industry is occluded and insular in a way that makes it seem like high school."

"I would never want to film hard-core pornography, because it always looks like open-heart surgery to me."

"In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to 'What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic.'"

"Pornography is not a monolith, either of apolitical pleasure or of unpleasurable power."

"Watching pornography [..] is like going to a Wikipedia page. You search for a specific thing, a specific feeling, a specific result, and that’s exactly what you find."

"A classic question in the communication literature is whether pornography consumption affects consumers' satisfaction. The present paper represents the first attempt to address this question via meta-analysis. Fifty studies collectively including more than 50,000 participants from 10 countries were located across the interpersonal domains of sexual and relational satisfaction and the intrapersonal domains of body and self satisfaction. Pornography consumption was not related to the intrapersonal satisfaction outcomes that were studied. However, pornography consumption was associated with lower interpersonal satisfaction outcomes in cross-sectional surveys, longitudinal surveys, and experiments. Associations between pornography consumption and reduced interpersonal satisfaction outcomes were not moderated by their year of release or their publication status. But analyses by sex indicted significant results for men only."

"Internet pornography consumption has been increasing due to the widespread use of the internet and become very common practice among people. Today, it has been considered that 46–74% of men and 16–41% of women are active pornography users in modern nations. These data are supported by one of the most popular porn website, PornHub, as reported over 39 billion searches and 42 billion visits during 2019, suggesting 115 million visits and 18,073 terabytes of data transferred per day. the coronavirus continues to spread globally, social distancing, self-isolation/quarantine, and national lockdowns have become the cores to control the pandemic. However, these measures may also lead to increases in social isolation, loneliness, and stress, which can alter the consumption of pornography habits."

"Individual difference variables representing personality traits are emerged as motivators of pornography consumption. The elements of individual difference variables associated with pornography consumption are sensation seeking, dispositional sexual affect (erotophobia–erotophilia), and narcissistic traits (entitlement). In addition to individual difference variables of pornography consumption, self-reported reasons can also be considered as factors that drive individuals to use pornography. Studies reported that sexual arousal and sexual enhancement were the predominant motivations for pornography consumption among the self-reported reasons. Aside from the sexual arousal and enhancement, coping and boredom are linked with greater use of pornography as well. Studies showed that higher levels of psychological distress often end up with greater levels of pornography consumption. When people have negative feeling like stress or anxiety, viewing pornography could offer temporary relief from those feelings. Similarly, curiosity and information seeking were the other contributing domains for pornography consumption. However, these reasons are less endorsed reasons for pornography use than hedonic reasons."

"Boredom is also considered a possible trigger of hypersexual behavior by Kafka. This notion is supported by a psychology research demonstrating that leisure boredom is a significant predictor of pornography use, suggesting that people consume porn more when they are bored. Rothman et al. define the use of pornography as a tool to relieve boredom. Similarly, a recent systemic review evaluating the association between boredom and hypersexuality identified a link between boredom and increased online sexual activity. The rationale behind this boredom effect may be due to the men’s novelty-seeking behaviors to reduce monotony and increase arousal. Another reason for increased porn consuming could be that some people are using sex as a surviving mechanism for coping with their loneliness, depressive symptoms, and even fear of death. In a study, Baltazar et al. reported that people are endorsing porn use to cope with negative affect. Again, in a study, pornography consumption is an important tool for mood management and stress relief. It should be noted that problematic pornography consumption is also considered to cope with negative emotions. As described by Lehmiller, the key idea behind Terror management theory is that “when we are reminded of our own mortality, we subconsciously alter our attitudes and behaviors to help us cope with the ‘terrifying’ prospect of our eventual death.” A research demonstrated that when we are faced with the prospect of our own mortality, this prompts sexual desire and behavior as a coping mechanism."

"The modeling of perceiving consumption of Internet pornography as problematic has already received scientific attention (Grubbs et al., 2019). Gola, Lewczuk, and Skorko (2016) studied the predictors of help-seeking behavior relevant to problematic pornography use. They reported that the quality of symptoms explains a significantly higher proportion of variance than the quantity of consumption of Internet pornography, suggesting that the frequency of use should be less diagnostically weighted to better meet the complexity of patients’ presenting concerns. Although abstinence from pornography might be regarded as a feasible intervention to alleviate any negative symptoms, no experimental investigations (but a few clinical case reports) have been made to date (Fernandez, Tee, & Fernandez, 2017)."

"Of the roughly half who had seen pornography, 53 percent of boys and 39 percent of girls said it was “realistic.” And in the recent Indiana University national survey, only one in six boys and one in four girls believed that women in online porn were not actually experiencing pleasure: As one suburban high school senior boy told me recently, “I’ve never seen a girl in porn who doesn’t look like she’s having a good time.”"

"“There’s nowhere else to learn about sex,” the suburban boy told me. “And porn stars know what they are doing.” His words reflect a paradox about sex and pornography in this country. Even as smartphones have made it easier for teenagers to watch porn, sex education in the United States — where abstinence-based sex education remains the norm — is meager."

"Daley went on to detail a 2010 study that coded incidents of aggression in best-selling 2004 and 2005 porn videos. She noted that 88 percent of scenes showed verbal or physical aggression, mostly spanking, slapping and gagging. (A more recent content analysis of more than 6,000 mainstream online heterosexual porn scenes by Bryant Paul and his colleagues defined aggression specifically as any purposeful action appearing to cause physical or psychological harm to another person and found that 33 percent of scenes met that criteria. In each study, women were on the receiving end of the aggression more than 90 percent of the time.)"

"A., the young woman who said she had never seen an image of a penis until she watched porn, resisted the idea that porn was uniformly bad for teenagers. “At least kids are watching porn and not going out and getting pregnant,” she said. But recently, she told me that she’d given up watching it altogether. She disliked looking at women’s expressions now, believing that they probably weren’t experiencing pleasure and might be in pain. When Drew watched porn, he found himself wondering if women were having sex against their will. As another student said with a sigh: “Nicole and Jess ruined porn for us.”"

"The effect of pornography on sexual response is understudied, particularly among women."

"On average, women using pornography were younger, and reported more interest in sex. Pornography frequency differed significantly by menopausal status, sexual orientation, anxiety/depression status, number of sexual partners, and origin of data collection. During masturbation, more frequent pornography use predicted lower arousal difficulty and orgasmic difficulty, greater pleasure, and a higher percentage of masturbatory events leading to orgasm. Frequency of pornography use predicted only lower arousal difficulty and longer orgasmic latencies during partnered sex, having no effect on the other outcome variables. Pornography use frequency did not predict overall relationship satisfaction or sexual relationship satisfaction. Overall, more frequent pornography use was generally associated with more favorable sexual response outcomes during masturbation, while not affecting most partnered sex parameters. Several demographic and relationship covariates appear to more consistently and strongly predict orgasmic problems during partnered sexual activity than pornography use."

"Research pertaining to pornography has traditionally been conducted from three perspectives. First, pornography use has been evaluated in relation to couples’ relationship satisfaction, often under the assumption that greater reliance upon erotic materials during masturbation is associated with poorer relationship outcomes. Second, pornography has been studied from a neurobehavioral perspective to determine whether individuals who report “compulsive” use exhibit neurophysiologic or epigenetic alterations that typify models of addiction. Third, content analyses of pornographic materials have been conducted to examine the extent to which exposure to beneficial/educational (e.g., providing clitoral stimulation during partnered sex), risky (e.g., condom-less sexual activity), or demeaning (e.g., lack of verbal consent during intercourse, sexual aggression, etc.) sexual scripts might increase the preponderance or social acceptability of such behaviors. Despite the insights gained from these approaches, few studies have analyzed putative direct effects of pornography use on the sexual response cycle, including arousal and orgasmic parameters, comparing masturbatory and partnered sexual activities. In stark contrast to prior research findings and public opinion, we did not find strong empirical support for the hypothesis that pornography use is consistently associated with greater sexual dysfunction or relationship dissatisfaction. In all five regression analyses related to masturbation, more frequent pornography use predicted greater ease of becoming aroused and reaching orgasm, longer latencies to orgasm, greater pleasure upon orgasm, and a higher percentage of masturbatory events leading to orgasm. Among the same parameters for partnered sexual activity, more frequent pornography use predicted greater ease becoming aroused and longer latencies, but no significant associations, either positive or negative, were observed for any of the other outcomes in the regression analyses. Overall, women’s use of pornography to enhance orgasmic response and pleasure was strongly supported by our findings, yet pornography use during masturbation appeared to have no deleterious effects on sexual functioning during partnered sex. Indeed, it was actually associated with lower arousal difficulty during partnered sex. Furthermore, no associations were observed between pornography use frequency and general relationship satisfaction or sexual relationship satisfaction with one’s primary partner in the previous 12 months. In these respects, our results highlight the potential positive effects that pornography use might have for women’s enjoyment of sex. Furthermore, to the extent that pornography use might represent greater openness to using less conventional strategies for enhancing their sexual experience, it may reflect one of a number of techniques that differentiate women who use pornography from women who do not."

"In our multinational, cross-sectional survey of pornography use and sexual response in women, higher frequency of pornography use predicted greater sexual functioning across all outcome variables during masturbation, yet had no deleterious effects on sexual outcomes during partnered activity. Across masturbation and partnered sex, lower levels of educational attainment and the presence of ongoing anxiety or depression were the two most consistent predictors of orgasmic dysfunction in the regression models. Greater sexual relationship satisfaction, in contrast, was associated with more favorable outcomes during partnered sex. Taken together, these findings suggest that the frequency of pornography use per se does not contribute to sexual problems during partnered sex., However, it could well be that a subset of women use erotic materials to compensate for psychosocial factors (e.g., dissatisfaction in one’s sexual relationships, ongoing anxiety or depression) that independently impinge upon sexual responsivity."

"... We talked of biography.—JOHNSON. 'It is rarely well executed. They only who live with a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination ; and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him. The chaplain of a late Bishop, whom I was to assist in writing some memoirs of his Lordship, could tell me scarcely any thing ...'"

"Talking of biography, I said, in writing a life, a man's peculiarities should be mentioned, because they mark his character. JOHNSON. 'Sir, there is no doubt as to peculiarities : the question is, whether a man's vices should be mentioned ...' ... 'If a man is to write A Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight ; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as it was ...'"

"There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed."

"The open-ended nature of biography is one of its mysterious attractions. No Life is ever definitive: it draws or rejects from past work, it reflects often unconsciously the concerns and questions of its own age, and it passes on something hidden to the future. Every serious attempt at an historic portrait of the dead will subtly absorb the ' and of its living author, however objective he or she sets out to be. This is precisely the strength, rather than the weakness, of its subjectivity."

"I am a biography nut myself, and I think when you're trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them."

"Though just biographic record will touch the failings of the good and the eminent with tenderness, it ought not to spread over them the veil of suppression."

"When I read the book, the biography famous, And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life? And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life, Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life, Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections I seek for my own use to trace out here.)"

"I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why – but we really need to land on that why. That’s what I’ve been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at."

"[Screenwriting] is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that."

"I moved into directing for a couple of reasons. ... Most directors, I discovered, need to be convinced that the screenplay they’re going to direct has something to do with them. And this is a tricky thing if you write screenplays where women have parts that are equal to or greater than the male part. And I thought, 'Why am I out there looking for directors?'—because you look at a list of directors, it’s all boys. It certainly was when I started as a screenwriter. So I thought, 'I’m just gonna become a director and that’ll make it easier.'"

"Mostly, you write a script and someone’s gonna rewrite you. They get hundreds of—not hundred but they get ten writers to write something. If you have a big budget, you can go and get a lot of people to write on script .... I just actually heard that somebody said, 'Well, your screenplay got bought and now someone like Carrie Fisher will come in and rewrite you.' And I feel terrible, you know, because that’s not what I mean to do. My idea was never to raid something and trash it, you know. ‘Cause that – that’s more work for me!"

"It seems to me it's the hardest thing 'cause you're starting from nothing and creating something. Everybody else is interpreting what you've written. Everybody else is an interpretive artist. Even the best of them. Stanley Kubrick was an interpretive artist. The best actors in the world are interpreting what's on the page, and they use it as a springboard to something else, but if it's not there, there's nothing to spring from. So the writer is the only person who's taking absolutely nothing, and 120 pages of it, and dirtying it up in such a way that it's gonna gross hundreds of millions of dollars and make a lot of people happy."

"A rule says "You must do it this way". A principle says, "This works... and has through all remembered time." The difference is crucial. Your work needn't be modeled after the well-made play; rather it must be well made within the principles that shape our art. Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form."

"In the 80’s and much of the 90’s, [[w:Joe Eszterhas|[Joe] Eszterhas]] was Hollywood’s best-paid screenwriter, sometimes receiving more cash for a script than the film’s director, who would usually find himself in a back-alley brawl with Mr. Eszterhas over their unshared vision. Some of these movies were hits. Some weren’t. One could count on seeing cartons of militantly smoked cigarettes, plenty of on-the-job hanky-panky and, in his late-period panty movies, ruttish lesbians and multiple grand-mal orgasms. “You like to play games, don’t you?” was a line that Mr. Eszterhas wrang out of his Olivetti manual more than once."

"The people who make movies are actually desperate for good material. They’re desperate. And honestly if you write a brilliant script they really wouldn’t care if you were a 95-year-old grandmother from Duluth. They really want something that’s brilliant on the page. And it’s actually one of the main reasons that I chose it, is that it’s very subject to elbow grease, subject to hard work."

"Well, Jack Warner may have been celebrated for calling writers "Schmucks with Underwoods," but 20 years earlier Irving Thalberg … said, "The most important person in the motion picture process is the writer, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from ever realizing it.""

"This...is why screenwriting pays so well. They don't pay me to write. I'd write for free. They pay me NOT to punch people in the neck."

"Interviewer: The book also assembles several scraps of paper, on which you wrote bits of dialogue or character development on the fly. Is that how you operate, scribbling something down whenever an idea pops into your head?"

"Hollywood groupthink is anathema to the nature of sci fi, which is a cerebral philosophical exploration of humankind and puncturing the limits of our imagination. I think the central concept here is that Hollywood, Cap H, is as terrified of sci fi as it is of an alien invasion. And that’s because the studios, as they have been increasingly corporatized, become absolutely risk averse in a way that they haven’t always been."

"John Rieder notes, for example, that the rising thirst for exploration of alien worlds in fiction starting in the nineteenth century, cannot be detached from growing awareness of an impending disappearance of a certain kind of exploration. He remarks: If the Victorian vogue for adventure fiction in general seems to ride the rising tide of imperial expansion, particularly into Africa and the Pacific, the increasing popularity of journeys into outer space or under the ground in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries probably reflects the near exhaustion of the actual unexplored areas of the globe…. Having no place on Earth left for the radical exoticism of unexplored territory, the writers invent places elsewhere."

"Nonetheless, the crosscurrents flowing between representations of alien encounters and the politics of colonialism remain an enduring subject of interest for scholars as evidenced by the many articles examining the films, District 9 and Avatar, as allegories of colonial encounters. Indeed, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is arguably the work that first revealed the extent to which it was possible to bring together science fiction and the problematic of postcoloniality for those scholars of African literature and cinema who had not previously given any thought to science fiction as a viable genre for African writers or filmmakers. Since then, scholarly discussions of District 9 have proliferated, but not necessarily in tandem with references to the wider context for African science fiction."

"Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts."

"Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould."

"Science fiction is that branch of literature that deals with human responses to changes in the level of science and technology."

"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all."

"I don't know of any science fiction writer who really attempts to be a prophet. Such authors accomplish their tasks not by being correct in their predictions, necessarily, but merely by hammering home—in story after story—the notion that life is going to be different."

"Science fiction always bases its future visions on changes in the levels of science and technology. And the reason for that consistency is simply that—in reality—all other changes throughout history have been irrelevant and trivial."

"The rockets that have made spaceflight possible are an advance that, more than any other technological victory of the twentieth century, was grounded in science fiction… . One thing that no science fiction writer visualized, however, as far as I know, was that the landings on the Moon would be watched by people on Earth by way of television."

"If you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into primates, suddenly you might transform primates into something that has some of the capacities that we regard as distinctively human – speech or other ways of being able to manipulate or relate to a human. These possibilities, at the moment, are largely being explored in fiction but we need to start thinking about them now."

"Two centuries. Two hundred years. That’s how long we’ve had science fiction. From the birth of Frankenstein, to the death of Ursula K. Le Guin. Two hundred years. Why aren’t there more? Maybe because science fiction, particularly in the golden age years, was just seen as something men did. Maybe because the boys’ club atmosphere put women off. Maybe women weren’t welcome. The first edition of Frankenstein was published anonymously. In 1967, a new science fiction author came on to the scene, James Tiptree Jr. It was at least a decade before the author of dozens of thoughtful, intelligent and often subversive short stories was revealed to be a woman called Alice Sheldon. In an interview with Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in 1983 she said of her pseudonymous career: “A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.” Women write science fiction. Women have always written science fiction. But often, they have been ignored, or sidelined, or simply slid under the radar. If they’re very good at writing science fiction, they can get co-opted out of the genre and into “literary fiction”. Take, for example, Margaret Atwood, whose work is out and-out science fiction, from The Handmaid's Tale to Oryx and Crake. Atwood once infamously said her work wasn’t science fiction at all, because that was all about “talking squids in outer space” But remember this: Mary Shelley was originally tasked to write a ghost story. Instead she invented science fiction with a novel that spoke of horrors yet pierced the heart of humanity."

"The hardest theme in science fiction is that of the alien. The simplest solution of all is in fact quite profound — that the real difficulty lies not in understanding what is alien, but in understanding what is self. We are all aliens to each other, all different and divided. We are even aliens to ourselves at different stages of our lives. Do any of us remember precisely what it was like to be a baby?"

"Myth, religion and now science-fiction with their tales of benevolent and malevolent extraterrestrial beings are commentaries on the human condition."

"The link between colonialism and science-fiction is every bit as old as the link between science-fiction and the future. John Rieder in his eye-opening book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science-Fiction notes that most scholars believe that science fiction coalesced "in the period of the most fervid imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth century." Sci-fi "comes into visibility," he argues, "first in those countries most heavily involved in imperialist projects—France and England" and then gradually gains a foothold in Germany and the U.S. as those countries too move to obtain colonies and gain imperial conquests. He adds, "Most important, no informed reader can doubt that allusions to colonial history and situations are ubiquitous features of early science fiction motifs and plots.""

"On the one hand, then, the reverse colonial stories in sci-fi can be used as a way to sympathize with those who suffer under colonialism. It puts the imperialists in the place of the Tasmanians and says, this could be you, how do you justify your violence now? On the other hand, reverse colonial stories can erase those who are at the business end of imperial terror, positing white European colonizers as the threatened victims in a genocidal race war , thereby justifying any excess of violence. Often, though, sci-fi does both at once—as, Rieder argues, Wells does in The War of the Worlds, which both sympathizes with the oppressed and suggests that survival-of-the-fittest colonial exploitation is natural, inevitable, and unstoppable (there is, after all, no talking to the Martians—or, therefore, to the Tasmanians?). The fact that colonialism is so central to science-fiction, and that science-fiction is so central to our own pop culture, suggests that the colonial experience remains more tightly bound up with our political life and public culture than we sometimes like to think. Sci-fi, then, doesn’t just demonstrate future possibilities, but future limits—the extent to which dreams of what we'll do remain captive to the things we've already done."

"But why do I simply shrug and stop reading if a whodunit turns out to be weary and derivative, while I feel acutely embittered when I find the same qualities in s-f? I see now that it is because s-f is a form which, more than almost any other, by its very nature demands creative originality. The detective story and even the more modern psychological crime novel are—like the western, the love story, the historical romance—fixed forms, in which the creative challenge lies largely in seeing what the author can do within established boundaries. S-f is—or perhaps better, should and must be a literature of stimulus and fresh horizons."

"Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen."

"Science-fiction works hand-in-glove with the universe."

"Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about."

"People who love science fiction really do love sex."

"I hate the whole ubermensch, superman temptation that pervades science fiction. I believe no protagonist should be so competent, so awe-inspiring, that a committee of 20 really hard-working, intelligent people couldn't do the same thing."

"Not only is every sci fi innovation kept secret, so that its flaws won't be uncovered and dealt with ahead of time, but the public seldom is invited to share in the New Thing. Or, if they do partake, they are portrayed using it as stupidly as possible, as in the flick Surrogates, where the brilliant invention of remote robotic surrogacy is only used to look good. Talk about a jaundiced view of your fellow citizens."

"Science fiction is the perfect "exploring ground," as it gives us the opportunity to play with different outcomes and strategies before we have to deal with the real-world costs."

"I am a huge fan of science fiction! Throughout my life I have marveled at the powerful, even transformative nature of speculative storytelling. The influence science fiction storytelling is having in popular culture right now is amazing to behold, and as a genuine fan of the medium, I truly believe we are in a New Age of speculative fiction. There is a pleasing phenomenon developing in the genre recently: the worthy inclusion of voices of color, which are being paid much overdue attention. Why this is important should be self-evident. However, for those sitting way in the back, consider this: we continually create the world we occupy-in our imaginations first, and only afterwards do we make those visions manifest in this world. So it stands to reason that a healthy society is one that respects and honors the voices of ALL of its components. For too long, the voices and visions for our future have been provided, for the most part, by and from a culturally European (if not Eurocentric) perspective. However, there is change afoot. The works of Octavia E. Butler are becoming mainstream, and names like Nnedi Okorafor and Lesley Nneka Arimah are bringing much needed flavor to the narratives that help shape our future."

"I fell into writing it because I saw a bad movie, a movie called Devil Girl from Mars, and went into competition with it. But I think I stayed with it because it was so wide open. It gave me the chance to comment on every aspect of humanity. People tend to think of science fiction as, oh, Star Wars or Star Trek. And the truth is, there are no closed doors, and there are no required formulas. You can go anywhere with it."

"When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn't in any of this stuff I read. The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, any way. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing."

"Like any branch of literature, science fiction reflects the trends of current thinking."

"No less a critic than C. S. Lewis has described the ravenous addiction that these magazines inspired; the same phenomenon has led me to call science fiction the only genuine consciousness-expanding drug."

"Nothing is deader than yesterday's science-fiction."

"SF has never really aimed to tell us when we might reach other planets, or develop new technologies, or meet aliens. SF speculates about why we might want to do these things, and how their consequences might affect our lives and our planet."

"One of the supreme, though unfortunately fairly rare, delights of modern science fiction is that in it you actually can, at times, find Ideas!—real, live, pulsating, coruscating Ideas. Some of them may be on the lame side, but that’s not really important; they still are signs that Someone Has Been Thinking Here. Rare indeed is this phenomenon!"

"[t]his notion leads to one of hard sf’s paradoxes: If our faith in science replaces religious faith, science is co-opted into becoming a religion, which, of course, would be unscientific. . . . The primacy of the sense of wonder in science fiction poses a direct challenge to religion: Does the wonder of science and the natural world as experienced through science fiction replace religious awe? . . . The idea that in the future better and more scientific things will replace all the things we currently need and use—a cosmic belief in an ever-improving standard of living—constitutes what I call the replacement principle of sf."

"Given everything I have read – though I definitely haven’t read everything there is – it seems that Filipino visions of the 22 PSA Newsletter #21 June 2018 Filipino Futures (continued) Articles future unanimously contain sustained social and familial ties. But these visions are also bleak. Dystopias, a stagnant society, and dwindling resources run amok in Philippine science fiction. Does that mean that even if society breaks down, we’ll be all right so long as we have our communities? However, it seems that Filipino young adult science fiction is overwhelmingly positive in its point of view. Since time immemorial, Philippine culture has often emphasized that its youths are the hope for the future, and Philippine YA science fiction does impress this upon its target market. I, for one, cannot wait to see what the future of Philippine science fiction will bring."

"I do watch a lot of television science fiction, and it is a particularly sexless world. With a lot of the material from America, I think gay, lesbian and bisexual characters are massively underrepresented, especially in science fiction, and I'm just not prepared to put up with that. It's a very macho, testosterone-driven genre on the whole, very much written by straight men. I think Torchwood possibly has television's first bisexual male hero, with a very fluid sexuality for the rest of the cast as well. We're a beacon in the darkness."

"Science Fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful."

"In the six years since Walking the Clouds was published, the world of science fiction has been transformed. The genre, once firmly associated with “the increasing significance of the future to Western techno- cultural consciousness” (Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, qtd in Dillon, 2), has been reclaimed by postcolonial and Indigenous thinkers, who are using the genre to imagine decolonial futures. The increasing global interest in Indigenous and Afro-futuristic narratives demonstrates that this genre, to draw on Dillon’s words, has “the capacity to envision Native futures, Indigenous hopes, and dreams recovered by rethinking the past in a new framework”. But, rather than a recent development, speculative fiction has always belonged to these cultures: as Dillon notes in her introduction, “Indigenous sf [science fiction] is not so new – just overlooked”."

"Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation."

"As mythmakers, science fiction writers have a double task, the first aspect of which is to make humanly relevant—literally, to humanize—the formidable landscapes of the atomic era. We must trace in the murky sky the outlines of such new constellations as the Telephone, the Helicopter, the Eight Pistons, the Neurosurgeon, the Cryotron. Often enough, in looking about the heavens for a place to install one of these latter-day figures, the mythmaker discovers that the new figure corresponds very neatly with one already there. The Motorcyclist, for instance,is congruent at almost all points with the Centaur, and no pantheon has ever existed without a great-bosomed, cherry-lipped Marilyn who promises every delight to her devotees. But matching old and new isn’t always this easy. Consider the Rocket Ship. Surely it represents something more than a cross between Pegasus and the Argo. What distinguishes the Rocket Ship is that (1) it is mechanically powered and that (2)its great speed carries it out of ordinary space into hyperspace, a realm of indefinable transcendence. My theory is that the contemporary human experience that the myth of the Rocket Ship apotheosizes is that of driving, or riding in, an automobile. We may deplore the use of cars as a means of self-realization and of public highways as roads to ecstasy, but only driver-training instructors would deny that this is what cars are all about. And, by extension, the Rocket Ship. The twenties and thirties, when driving was still a relative novelty, were also the heyday of the archetypal and, in their way, insurpassable—power fantasies of E. E.Smith and other, lesser bards of the Model T. Among adolescents and in countries such as Italy, where car ownership confers the same ego satisfaction as surviving a rite of passage, the Rocket Ship remains the most venerated of sf icons—and not because it embodies a future possibility but because it interprets a common experience."

"Inner Sanctum: Do you have any advice for young writers of science fiction? Dung: Well, in my opinion, in order to write science fiction, an author has to love both the social and natural sciences and be a skillful writer. Moreover, you should have a deep knowledge of social issues. As a writer, an imaginative mind is necessary to create interesting work. First begin writing short stories, then try with novels. You must combine scientific knowledge and literary skill. Inner Sanctum: In your opinion, what attracts a reader to science fiction? What do they gain from reading it? Dung: Science fiction is based on scientific knowledge and imagination. It’s not all impossible. Captain Nemo’s submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was a prediction. The fact is that we now make them to explore the bottom of the sea. Readers are attracted to it because they want an intelligent adventure. The stories make them think, imagine and deduce. The stories predict the future of science and even suggest what scientists will invent."

"There, Master Niketas," Baudolino said, "when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. ... There is nothing better than imagining other worlds," he said, "to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one."

"Everyone likes watching an epic sci-fi battle. But whether it’s Star Trek’s Federation versus the Borg, Battlestar Galactica versus the Cylons, or the Rebel Alliance versus the Empire, most veterans are left wondering, “It’s like a thousand years in the future. Why are they fighting like it’s the Bronze Age or something?”"

"The last manned fighter planes that will ever be produced are being manufactured right now. Even with that, pilots in Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars are still dueling at short range as though it was World War II. Larger spaceships (I’m looking at you, Millenium Falcon) even have bubble turrets, with gunners swivelling around like on a B-17."

"The big starships are even worse, though. They face off like sailing ships of the 18th century, harkening back to days of yore. Star Trek often has starships facing each other at close range, making everyone think, “That Admiral Nelson was really on to something with those sailing ships and broadside cannon battles!” While Star Trek is the archetype, Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars also feature ships facing off like the British against the French at Trafalgar. After travelling billions of miles and using entire solar systems as their battlegrounds, they fight to the death at ranges of a few feet, and frequently make remarkably little use of the fact that they operate in three dimensions."

"General David Petraeus didn’t personally kill Osama bin Laden. Why does “General” Han Solo lead a squad to take out the shield generator? His friends Admiral Akbar and General Calrissian, along with the rest of the rebel command structure, are above, fighting in a short-range gun battle with Imperial Star Destroyers. Captains Kirk and Picard on Star Trek are one-man SEAL teams fighting the enemy whenever they decide to take a break from their real jobs commanding starships, even though they have crews of literally several hundred other people better suited to fighting than the ship’s captain. And while we’re talking about it, what’s going on with space invasions? The last opposed beach landing was at Inchon, over 60 years ago. Even that site was picked to avoid the heart of enemy defenses. Amphibious assaults in World War II were successful, but at a huge price. Helicopter tactics have changed to avoid hot landing zones. With most helicopters running over $20 million a pop, they aren’t thrown out lightly. The same is true for amphibious ships. Who knows how much a spaceship costs? You wouldn’t know by looking at Starship Troopers, Avatar (2009 film), or Star Wars: Episode II. They drop in from space in fragile, helicopter-type vehicles, directly into the enemy defenses. They can literally land anywhere else on the planet, but they choose to land right in front of enemy laser cannon."

"I think the last time I had one of those "CNN moments," where I was slammed right up against the windshield of the present, would have been seeing that federal building in Oklahoma City lying there in its own crater…and getting the idea that something bad had happened in Middle America… Whenever something like this happens…it ups the ante on being a science-fiction writer. It changes the nature of the game."

"[S]cience fiction implies that the knots of terrestrial racism will eventually loosen because Terrans will have to unite against the aliens, androids, or BEMs [Bug-Eyed Monsters] of the galaxy. Under these circumstances, humans become remarkable for their humanity, not their ethnicity. Robert Scholes seems to have this concept in mind when heremarks that science fiction as a form “has been a bit advanced in its treatment of race and race relations. Because of their orientation toward the future, science fiction writers frequently assumed that America’s major problem in this area—black/white relations—would improve or even wither away.“7 . . .While Scholes and others conveniently assume that distinctions based on race will become invalid in possible future worlds and that it is therefore unnecessary for a character to have a distinct racial background, their presumed total eradication of distinctions based on color or ethnicity seems doubtful short of the Millennium."

"I think that science fiction, even the corniest of it, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it's written, has a distinct therapeutic value because all of it has as its primary postulate that the world does change."

"By the closing years of the twentieth century, after the climax of the Cold War,American science fiction reflected a prevalent sense that typical Western subjects were essentially victims of their own society and culture, colonized by vast networks of artificial simulacra, justified in their desire to break through to something more authentic (and recover the priviledge of threatened masculine agency in the process). In the late 1990s, popular science fiction was dominated by awakening-from-simulacrum stories-exemplified by films like The Matrix (1999), Dark City (1998), and The Truman Show (1998)-which all presented narratives (with predecessors reaching back to Phillip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint [1959] and beyond) in which the main characters found themselves trapped within a false or simulated world striving to gain access to some more real or authentic exterior. Everyday life, in these narratives, was often portrayed as a kind of emasculating ensnarement within post-Fordist systems of command and control. Protagonists like Neo from The Matrix or Tyler Durden from Fight Club struggled against their externally imposed roles within boring and lifeless administrative white-collar jobs focused on keeping the late capitalist system running. There was a general sense in these films and stories that life had somehow become false or artificial, and science fiction literalized the metaphor of being trapped in an alienating system designed to keep one docile, numb, and plugged into an endless cycle of late capitalist production and consumption."

"“Arguably, one of the most familiar memes of science fiction is that of going to foreign countries and colonising the natives, and as I’ve said elsewhere, for many of us, that’s not a thrilling adventure story; it’s non-fiction, and we are on the wrong side of the strange-looking ship that appears out of nowhere. To be a person of colour writing science fiction is to be under suspicion of having internalised one’s colonisation”."

"What we get from science fiction—what keeps us reading it, in spite of our doubts and occasional disgust—is not different from the thing that makes mainstream stories rewarding, but only expressed differently. We live on a minute island of known things. Our undiminished wonder at the mystery which surrounds us is what makes us human. In science fiction we can approach that mystery, not in small, everyday symbols, but in the big ones of space and time."

"Science fiction is an internationalist genre. When a novel is set in a galaxy far, far, away current geopolitical boundaries don't have a lot of meaning. However, Kaufman says there was a time when you could sell a novel set in space, but you couldn't sell a science fiction novel set in Australia."

"From a social point of view most SF has been incredibly regressive and unimaginative. All those Galactic Empires, taken straight from the British Empire of 1880. All those planets — with 80 trillion miles between them! — conceived of as warring nation-states, or as colonies to be exploited, or to be nudged by the benevolent Imperium of Earth towards self-development — the White Man’s Burden all over again. The Rotary Club on Alpha Centauri, that’s the size of it."

"Science-fiction is a literary province I used to visit fairly often; if I now visit it seldom, that is not because my taste has improved but because the province has changed, being now covered with new building estates, in a style I don't care for. But in the good old days I noticed that whenever critics said anything about it, they betrayed great ignorance. They talked as if it were a homogeneous genre. But it is not, in the literary sense, a genre at all. There is nothing common to all who write it except the use of a particular 'machine'. Some of the writers are of the family of Jules Verne and are primarily interested in technology. Some use the machine simply for literary fantasy and produce what is essentially Märchen or myth. A great many use it for satire; nearly all the most pungent American criticism of the American way of life takes this form, and would at once be denounced as un-American if it ventured into any other. And finally, there is the great mass of hacks who merely 'cashed in' on the boom in science-fiction and used remote planets or even galaxies as the backcloth for spy-stories or love-stories which might as well or better have been located in Whitechapel or the Bronx. And as the stories differ in kind, so of course do their readers. You can, if you wish, class all science-fiction together; but it is about as perceptive as classing the works of Ballantyne, Conrad and W. W. Jacobs together as 'the sea-story' and then criticising that."

"It is absurd to condemn them [science fiction stories] because they do not often display any deep or sensitive characterization. They oughtn't to. … Every good writer knows that the more unusual the scenes and events of his story are, the slighter, more ordinary, the more typical his persons should be. Hence Gulliver is a commonplace little man and Alice is a commonplace little girl. If they had been more remarkable they would have wrecked their books. The Ancient Mariner himself is a very ordinary man. To tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an oddity too much; he who is to see strange sights must not himself be strange."

"With Arab literature so focused on classical themes, an Orwellian allegory, for instance, would tackle the present and envision a future in a more clandestine fashion than a straightforward political attack. Sultana's Dream is an example of such critique. Written in 1905 by a Muslim feminist writer and social reformer who lived in British India, it is one of the earliest examples of feminist science fiction, and is a sort of gender-based Planet of the Apes where the roles are reversed and the men are locked away in a technologically advanced future."

"I like to present my characters—whether they are in the past or in the future—with interesting moral choices, and it seems to me that science-fiction writers are, or should be, the prophets and moralists of today. I am fairly well up on the biological sciences, but I am deeply uninterested in gadgets. A writer's job is to write about people with sympathy and insight."

"Brian Rollins: You're one of the few sci-fi writers in Hollywood to use religion in your shows. What kind of resistance/acceptance do you see from industry insiders and fans?"

"The whiteness of speculative fiction is something I have myself done extensive research on, beginning with the earliest examples of speculative fiction first set in, and then originating from, Southern Africa – H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines in 1885."

"This linguistic progress has not been limited to literature. The 2017 BRICS (an association of five major emerging national economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa Film Festival held in Chengdu, China saw the debut of Jahmil XT Qubeka’s 20 minute short film, Stillborn, which follows the android Nobomi SX1 as she tries to uncover the cultural past of the now extinct humans that created her. With dialogue entirely in isiXhosa, the film is the first South African science fiction film not in English."

"Sci-fi can be succinctly defined as speculation, whether based on established scientific facts or on logical pseudo-facts consistent with the framework of the fiction in question, involving smelly green pimply aliens furiously raping or eating, or both, beautiful naked bare-breasted chicks, covering them in slime, red, oozing, living slime, dribbling from every horrific orifice, squeezing out between bulbous pulpy lips onto the sensuous velvety skin of the writhing sweating slave-girls, their bodies cut and bruised by knotted whips brandished by giant blond vast-biceped androids called Simon, and written in the Gothic mode."

"Science fiction has existed in China almost as long as it existed in the West. It began in the late-Qing Dynasty, with scholars translating the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells into Chinese. Among such translators was Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature himself. Of course, tales of the strange and mysterious permeate Chinese literature from its ancient origins on, but the first work generally recognized as an original Chinese science fiction story was Colony of the Moon (月球殖民地). It was published as a serial from 1904 to 1905 under the pen name Huangjiang Diaosou (荒江钓叟), which means “Old Fisherman by a Deserted River.” Many other works were published during this early-twentieth-century period. The genre was perceived to have literary merit through its ability to incite interest among readers in the rapidly evolving fields of science and technology, in which China was involved in a game of catch-up."

"Sf cinema is undeniably dominated by the American film industry, at least in Western countries and since the end of World War II. Not only are the majority of sf films released each year produced in the US, but many of them are Hollywood blockbusters made with the biggest of budgets, while nations with very rich cinematic histories, such as France and Italy, have made comparatively few contributions in the genre. There is, however, a not-insignificant corpus of sf cinema produced in Latin America. These films have mostly been ignored by critics and academics, both nationally and internationally, and only in the past few years have they begun to show signs of being rediscovered."

"Science fiction, speculative fiction, whatever you want to call it, is one of the ways to explore social issues in fiction. You can explore what it's going to be like if current trends continue. You can change a variable and see what that does."

"the most fruitful ways to approach the future for me are speculative fiction or utopian fiction. Isaac Asimov once said that all science fiction falls into three categories: What if, If only, and If this continues."

"Of course, science-fiction is an expensive genre to produce. VFX, starships, superheroes, these all cost money. And it’s true Africa can’t yet compete with Hollywood feature films in terms of scale the way it can in terms of imagination. It may take some getting used to, watching a very different sort of Sci-Fi, but these films throw up challenging new ways of thinking about Sci-Fi socially, politically and in terms of what our real future might look like. The closest place to find what we’re used to watching, though, would be South Africa, where artists have used the short, rather than feature film format to explore ideas of how we live in the modern day, shaped ever-more by technology. Another thing everyone says when one brings up African sci-fi is, “You mean like District 9?” And, yes, we do mean like that. A lot like that, actually. As a nation, we like to claim District 9, but let’s face it the money and the audience were American."

"In schools, for example, there are courses in the criticism of literature, art criticism, and so forth. The arts are supposed to be 'not real.' It is quite safe, therefore, to criticize them in that regard -- to see how a story or a painting is constructed, or more importantly, to critically analyze the structure of ideas, themes, or beliefs that appear, say, in the poem or work of fiction. When children are taught science, there is no criticism allowed. They are told, 'This is how things are.' Science's reasons are given as the only true statements about reality, with which no student is expected to quarrel. Any strong intellectual explorations or counter versions of reality have appeared in science fiction, for example. Here scientists, many being science-fiction buffs, can channel their own intellectual questioning into a safe form. 'This is, after all, merely imaginative and not to be taken seriously.'"

"Science fiction rarely is about scientists doing real science, in its slowness, its vagueness, the sort of tedious quality of getting out there and digging amongst rocks and then trying to convince people that what you're seeing justifies the conclusions you're making. The whole process of science is wildly under-represented in science fiction because it's not easy to write about. There are many facets of science that are almost exactly opposite of dramatic narrative. It's slow, tedious, inconclusive, it's hard to tell good guys from bad guys — it's everything that a normal hour of Star Trek is not."

"For the last three decades, the arbiters of taste in science fiction have followed the lead of the mainstream literary publishing industry. When that industry embraced modernist literature—literature with little or no narrative, literature that attempted to capture “real life” in beautiful prose—the industry turned its back on storytelling. Science fiction, in attempt to gain legitimacy, did the same. Too many books, published from the late sixties to now, are stylistically brilliant and essentially dull."

"There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women."

"In the field of science fiction or fantasy, morality—when it enters a book at all—is almost always either thoughtlessly liberal (you can’t judge other cultures) or thoughtlessly illiberal (strong men must rule) or just plain thoughtless (killing people is bad)."

"The futurist fiction literary genre is a 20th-century phenomenon. According to Gregory Benford, a physicist and a much-laureled hard SF author, “[S]cience fiction arose in a time affected by science’s unsettling relations about ourselves, about our position in the naturalorder—and by relentless technology, science’s burly handmaiden. Science fiction has tried to grapple with ideas which disturb our sense of being at home in the world” (16). Kathryn Cramer sets the beginning of futurist fiction proper in the 1920s (25), as does David G. Hartwell, who claims futurist fiction began when Hugo Gernsback, editor for Amazing Stories, labeled the newgenre as “scientifiction” in 1926 (31, 37). During the 1920s, Hartwell maintains, a growing split developed between high- (Modernist) and low- (popular or paraliterary) literature. Futurist fiction took the brunt of the split as H. G. Wells lost his long aesthetic battle to Henry James, who championed “art for art’s sake.” Wells proceeded to become a popular and successful author and one of the first authorities on futurist fiction technique. As Well’s proto-genre took shape, it evolved in antithesis to Jamesian Modernism by rejecting the valorization of style and innovative content (Hartwell 36). According to Hartwell, clear definitions for futurist fiction would not arise until the mid-1930s when John W. Campbell, who prized scientific integrity in the new genre, assumed editorial responsibility for Astounding Stories (37)."

"For Samuel R. Delany, Jr., speculative fiction, as he preferred to call the genre, is radically different from standard fiction for reasons ranging from syntactic variation to thematic vistas to authorial function (Science447-51). Joanna Russ agrees with Delany’s assessment. She notes that futurist fiction is highly didactic, and for any didactic work to be understood by its reader-critics, they must grasp its constitutive principles. Thus, Russ maintains, as science generates new paradigms, the vast majority of contemporary literary critics who lack a sufficient scientific understanding cannot credibly assay speculative fiction (556-67). Although Russ’ polemic can be applied to futurist fiction generally, it is most directly relevant to hard SF. Hard SF valorizes the central tenet that scientific plausibility must constitute the guiding framework for the story. Although John W. Campbell promulgated its tenets in the 1930s, hard SF would not become a distinct FFF subgenre until the late 1950s ormid-1960s. Some critics see the establishment of hard SF as a conservative reaction to the New Wave literary movement, which embraced extra-scientific influences."

"The question of more pointed significance to the Black community is whether the advent of and devotion to science—which has been used, as a science fiction, throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries to justify slavery and the inferiority of Blacks—will undercut religion in the African diaspora. Religion has long occupied the central role in the freedom struggle of the Black community (Du Bois, Souls 211-20; Franklin 92-95,146-47; Woodson 52-53). According to Hartwell, much of futurist fiction in the 1940s and 1950s elevated scientific knowledge above other systems of thought, and thus “a lot of it was xenophobic, elitist, racist, and psychologically naive” (38). Apparently, not even the recent unmasking of the widespread eradication or co-opting of diasporic scientific accomplishments engendered by the wave of Black studies programs initiated in the early 1970s has undone the Black community’s suspicion toward science."

"Real science is as amenable to exciting and engrossing fiction as fake science, and I think it is important to exploit every opportunity to convey scientific ideas in a civilization which is both based upon science and does almost nothing to ensure that science is understood."

"Many scientists deeply involved in the exploration of the solar system (myself among them) were first turned in that direction by science fiction. And the fact that some of that science fiction was not of the highest quality is irrelevant. Ten-year-olds do not read the scientific literature."

"Situated within the considerable body of creative material that is set in a future Australia, only a small body of this literary work has been authored by First Nations writers. These works include Archie Weller’s 1999 novel Land of The Golden Clouds , Alexis Wright’s 2013 novel The Swan Book, Ambellin Kwaymullina’s young adult Tribe series, Ellen van Neervan’s 2014 short story “Water” from Heat and Light, and Claire G. Coleman’s 2017 novel Terra Nullius."

"It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable."

"Since the summer of 2012, the patent war between Samsung and Apple has been raging in almost every media outlet in South Korea, reminding the public of their country’s status as the newly risen IT capital in the global community. This recognition indeed extends far beyond the Korean borders; in the recent film Cloud Atlas (2012), for instance, the Western gaze shifts its focus to (Neo-) Seoul as the site of our time’s techno-orientalist future-scape, instead of adhering to the classic imageries of Tokyo or Hong Kong as we have seen in Blade Runner (1982) or Ghost in the Shell (1995). Curiously, however, science fiction as a literary representation of the technologized science South Korea thrives on nowadays never appears to have gained traction in Korea’s own cultural imaginary."

"Remember that Jules Verne was a sort of Shakespeare of science fiction, and we would feel derelict if we did not give his stories in our columns."

"The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different."

"In most Latin American countries, SF&F fiction, both in literature and cinema, tends to be underrated, neglected or simply overlooked by critics and scholars. In Brazil, for instance, SF&F suffers from historical prejudices held by the academic milieu, editorial markets and audiovisual industries. For instance, Mary Elizabeth Ginway suggests that the invisibility of Brazilian science fiction literature could be ascribed to the overrating of the realist novel in Brazil. According to Ginway, Brazilian science fiction still suffers from elitist cultural attitudes that prevail in Brazil; the idea that a “Third World” country could not genuinely produce such a genre. Nevertheless, Latin American SF&F does exist, although it is seldom detected by most film critics, scholars, historians, and perhaps, even by major audiences. This panorama could be due to limited film budgets, and the lack of consistent film industries in Latin America (understanding “industry” in its most orthodox sense). In summary, the alleged “invisibility” of Latin American SF&F film might be partially, if not entirely, explained by historical instability affecting the Latin American film industry. Thus, cultural biases have sided with infrastructural issues in the preclusion of Latin American SF&F cinema."

"There is no such thing as science fiction, there is only science eventuality."

"And there, right there, is the area in which science fiction leads the literary side of its life. It is the job of the science-fiction writer to take the utterly fantastic, if need be, and make it seem as real as a copy of today's tabloid newspaper folded to the sports section. To the extent that he succeeds in this he is a good science-fiction writer, and to the extent that he fails to make the story believable he is a bad one, be it ever so full of faster-than-light gimmicks and futuristic individuals with triple brains and mechanical genitalia."

"Science fiction, thus considered, is not a mere pocket in the varicolored vest of modern writing; it is a new kind of fiction, the beginnings of a long-delayed revolution in letters consequent upon the revolutions that the last two hundred years have witnessed in science, industry, and politics. By this I do not at all mean that it is the only possible literature of the present time, just that it is the type most peculiar to it, most indicative of its larger intellectual trends."

"Whether or not the science fiction will eventually develop a Shakespeare, I would not dare to predict. But I do claim that it is a literature produced by our times as much as Shakespeare's was by his. And its unfortunate, frequent vulgarities can well be equated with the vulgarities and plebeian absurdities of much Elizabethan writing, both reflecting the primitive vitality of the mass audience that responded to them. It is, of course, in any age, only moribund fiction that is polished to a point of antisepsis, and that will, in losing touch with its audience, “lose the name of action.” This new medium has as yet lost neither."

"The human mind is lit by an elemental sense of wonder, a probing, restless curiosity that is our primate heritage and that from its beginnings has sought a knowledge, some knowledge, of the future. To satisfy that need there has come into being a massive and thoroughly modern creation, science fiction, the literature of extrapolative, industrial man."

"Dark matter as a metaphor offers us an interesting way of examining blacks and science fiction. The metaphor can be applied to a discussion of the individual writers as black artists in society and how that identity affects their work. It can also be applied to a discussion of their influence and impact on the sf genre in general. While the "black sf as dark matter" metaphor is novel, the concept behind it is not. The metaphor is neither farfetched nor uncommon if one considers popular themes within the black literary tradition. An excellent example is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1945), a novel that introduced the idea of black invisibility...It is my sincere hope that Dark Matter will help shed light on the sf genre, that it will correct the misperception that black writers are recent to the field, and that it will encourage more talented writers to enter the genre."

"Science fiction is a very big canvas for a film maker to work on because if you are doing a drama, society imposes its rules on you and you have to live by those guidelines; more or less. But in science fiction you get to make up the rules of the world you create."

"The "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable … soon."

"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."

"I advance the thesis that science fiction brings teleology to science, tells of origins and destinies, both asserts and denies “the expectancy of the familiar,” is—in brief—both mythopoeic and mythoclastic."

"It is as romantic myth (“as connoting le roman, or deliberately contrived story”) that I believe science fiction finds its functional definition."

"We hope it will not be long before we may have other works of Science-Fiction [like Richard Henry Horne’s ‘‘The Poor Artist’’], as we believe such books likely to fulfill a good purpose, and create an interest, where, unhappily, science alone might fail. [[Thomas Campbell|[Thomas] Campbell]] says, that ‘‘Fiction in Poetry is not the reverse of truth, but her soft and enchanting resemblance.’’ Now this applies especially to Science-Fiction, in which the revealed truths of Science may be given, interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true—thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of life."

"“As a mixed-race Asian American, I am used to and feel comfortable existing as ‘other.’ The universes to be found in science fiction are both exciting, and also feel like home,” says Seattle artist Stasia Burrington, whose work is featured in the exhibit. “It feels natural to explore and expand definitions of our reality, and possibilities of what’s to come. I feel like we (contemporary artists) are in an exciting place.” Burrington created an alien landscape mural that touches on the theme of how Asians relate to sci-fi. Some immigrants feel a connection to the alien stories in classic sci-fi, leaving home and traveling to a new planet where you don’t quite belong. Others reject the idea that they are “aliens” and don’t want to be portrayed that way. This diversity of viewpoints is an important part of the exhibition experience. Many artists focused on using sci-fi ideas and creating art through an Asian Pacific American lens. “I was excited about the challenge of taking sci-fi/fantasy ideas and manifest it in a concrete, artistic form through an Asian American lens. I used the word coined by author Ken Liu, ‘Silkpunk,’ to guide and inform elements of my hanging sculpture,” says June Sekiguchi, another local artist whose work is showcased in the exhibit. As evidenced by the number of Asian Americans who work behind the scenes to make sci-fi the massive success it is today, the community has a far greater impact on the genre than is visible on the surface. Exhibits like “Worlds Beyond” offer context and a glimpse into the worlds they help create."

"Science fiction is the branch of literature that perceives the universe through the widest-angle lens. Unlike the mainstream of literature, which attempts, more or less, to depict the real world and real people in present or historic situations with the maximum amount of verisimilitude, science fiction acknowledges from the start that it is fantasy, that it is not depicting that which is or that which has been but is engaging in assaying the actions of people and things against backgrounds of limitless imagination."

"Science fiction has always been with us—writers have always speculated on the horizons of the not-yet-proven—and examples can be culled from the dawn of written lore and are to be found in all periods of storytelling. To some extent this is a type of escapism and to some extent it is a form of genetic curiosity: people always want to know what is over the next hill and beyond the farthest horizon rise and at the end of the rainbow. When tellers of tall tales could no longer convince an audience not quite as gullible as our less informed ancestors, the art of science fiction came into being. Extend what we know a little further, advance the line of what could be, bring in the “if this goes on” factor—and we have science fiction. Fantasy designed as reality."

"Science fiction has been good for publishers so far; it should continue profitably if nobody overdoes it, if the market is not flooded beyond the real purchasing and reading capacity of its audience, if not too much avant-garde junk is overpraised and not too much simplistic trash is overproduced."

"True epics of course are few and historically well spaced, but that slightly more mundane ingredient, the speculative impulse, be it of Classic, Christian or Renaissance shading, which ornamented Western literature with romances, fables, exotic voyages and utopias, seemed to me basically the same turn of fancy exercised today in science fiction, working then with the only objects available to it. It took the Enlightenment, it took science, it took the industrial revolution to provide new sources of idea that, pushed, poked, inverted and rotated through higher spaces, resulted in science fiction. When the biggest, the most interesting ideas began emerging from science, rather than from theology or the exploration of new lands, hindsight makes it seem logical that something like science fiction had to be delivered."

"Science fiction narratives appeared in the North Korean children's magazine Adong munhak between 1956 and 1965, and they bear witness to the significant Soviet influence in this formative period of the DPRK. Moving beyond questions of authenticity and imitation, however, this article locates the science fiction narrative within North Korean discourses on children's literature preoccupied with the role of fiction as both a reflection of the real and a projection of the imminent, utopian future. Through a close reading of science fiction narratives from this period, this article underscores the way in which science, technology, and the environment are implicated in North Korean political discourses of development, and points to the way in which these works resolve the inherent tension between the desirable and seemingly contradictory qualities of the ideal scientist—obedient servant of the collective and indefatigable questioner—to establish the child-scientist as the new protagonist of the DPRK."

"Universal history is the history of a few metaphors."

"Metaphors and Similes are the beginning of the democratic system of envy."

"The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry. We are as helpless today to define mass, fundamentally, as Newton was. But we do not therefore think, and neither did he, that the equations which contain mass as an unknown are mere rules of thumb."

"All metaphors, at least such of them that are best chosen, are applied to the senses, especially the seeing, which of all senses is the most exquisite. Thus when we say, the tincture of politeness, the softness of good-breeding, the murmer of waters, and sweetness of language; these metaphors are all taken from the other senses. But the metaphors taken from the sense of seeing are much more striking, because they place in the eye of the imagination objects... otherwise... impossible for us to see or comprehend. For there is nothing in nature but what we may adapt its name to signify something else; and every object from which a likeness may be raised, as it may from all objects, if metaphorically applied..."

"When you told me you used to chase tornados I always thought it was a metaphor!"

"For the [Kogi and Ika] Indians of the Sierra, everything begins and ends with the loom, and the metaphor of thread in the cosmic cloth. Constantly on the move as they gather food and various resources, the Indians refer to their wanderings as "weavings", each journey a thread woven into a sacred cloak over the Great Mother, each seasonal movement a prayer for the well-being of the people and the entire Earth. When the people of the Sierra plant a field, the women sow lines of crops parallel to the sides of the plot. The men work their way across the field in a horizontal direction. The result, should the domains of man and woman be superimposed one upon the other, is a fabric. The garden is a piece of cloth."

"In the interpretation of figurative passages, let the following canon be observed. If the passage be preceptive, either forbidding some flagitious deed and some heinous crime, or commanding something useful and beneficent: then such passage is not figurative. But, if the passage seems, either to command some flagitious deed and some heinous crime, or to forbid something useful and beneficent: then such passage is figurative. Thus, for example, Christ says: Unless ye shall eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood; ye shall have no life in you. Now, in these words, he seems to command a heinous crime or a flagitious deed. Therefore the passage is a figure, enjoining us to communicate in the passion of our Lord, and admonishing us to lay it up sweetly and usefully in our memory because, for us, his flesh was crucified and wounded. On the other hand, Scripture says: If thy enemy shall hunger, give him food; if he shall thirst, give him drink. Here, without all doubt, an act of beneficence is enjoined."

"Metaphors hide in plain sight, and their influence is largely unconscious. We should mind our metaphors, though, because metaphors make up our minds."

"The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? They are not simply discovered by pure observation; they require new modes of thought. And where can we find them, if old modes do not even include the right metaphors? The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness. The basic chanciness and unpredictability of science must also reside in the inherent difficulty of such a task."

"We often think, naïvely, that missing data are the primary impediments to intellectual progress — just find the right facts and all problems will dissipate. But barriers are often deeper and more abstract in thought. We must have access to the right metaphor, not only to the requisite information. Revolutionary thinkers are not, primarily, gatherers of facts, but weavers of new intellectual structures."

"The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition."

"To reassert the reign of beauty, Copernicus goes back to what he had once called "the first principles of uniform motion." He rejects non-uniformities and inconsistancies of motion - his "mind shudders" at the very consideration of them - and even at the cost of setting the earth in motion, he arrives at a system that has all the earmarks of divine handicraft; the s are gone, the phenomena are saved; the whole system has symmetry, parsimony, necessity. ... The device of uniform motion in a circle was not forced by the data; and as Kepler's ellipses showed later, it was not even the most functional device from the mathematical point of view. Yet the metaphor of uniform circular motion as the divine key... - even as in antiquity - had infected the thinking from which the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century came. ...the function of a metaphor ..."can be a restructuring of the world," in the words of Sir Ernst Gombrich."

"In the work of the active scientist there are not merely occasions for using metaphor, but necessities for doing so, as when trying to remove an unbearable gap or monstrous fault. I now turn... to... the necessity built into the process of scientific rationality itself, an epistemological necessity... It is simply the limitation of induction. Where logic fails, analogic continues. The bridge is now made no longer of steel but of gossamer. It breaks often, but sometimes it carries us across the gulf... there is nothing else that will."

"Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world."

"The divine kingdom to be regained is psychological not physical. It is metaphorical not literal. It is "within" not in extenso."

"Surely the excellence of all poetry — what puts Shelley above Keats, Goethe above Shelley (in his Lyrics), and English, German and Italian Poetry so incomparably above French—surely the great thing is the co-ordination into a total mood, as distinguished from the charm of detached metaphors or descriptions or verses."

"We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on."

"All reflection, thought and criticism began in comparison, analogy and metaphor. Faust was wrong: in the beginning was not the act. St. John was right: in the beginning was the word. We are concerned with man, and the world can only exist for man as man knows or imagines it. Metaphor is the route of reason, science and art."

"If we are to understand the body as metaphor, and as source of metaphors derivable directly from it, we must remember that our own experience of our bodies is prescientific."

"A metaphor is a word used in an unfamiliar context to give us a new insight; a good metaphor moves us to see our ordinary world in an extraordinary way."

"A man's reach must exceed his grasp or what's a metaphor?"

"All words, in every language, are metaphors."

"We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities."

"What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins."

"Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept."

"The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself."

"The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot [and left behind] inside one of His creatures when He made him."

"In order to understand, in the case of miracles, what actually took place, we ought to be familiar with Jewish phrases and metaphors; anyone who did not make sufficient allowance for these, would be continually seeing miracles in Scripture where nothing of the kind is intended by the writer; he would thus miss the knowledge not only of what actually happened, but also of the mind of the writers of the sacred text."

"The mechanical philosophy is a case of being victimized by metaphor. I choose Descartes and Newton as excellent examples of metaphysicians of mechanism malgré eux, that is to say, as unconscious victims of the metaphor of the great machine. Together they have founded a church, more powerful than that founded by Peter and Paul, whose dogmas are now so entrenched that anyone who tries to reallocate the facts is guilty of more than heresy...there is a remedy against the domination imposed, not by generals, statesmen, and men of action, whose power dissolves when they retire, but by the great sort-crossers, whose power increases when they die-the remedy of becoming aware of metaphor..."

"There is a remedy against the domination imposed, not by generals, statesmen, and men of action, whose power dissolves when they retire, but by the great sort-crossers, whose power increases when they die- the remedy of becoming aware of metaphor..."

"In short, the use of metaphor involves both the awareness of duality of sense and the pretense that the two different senses are one."

"Man has always been afraid of anything mysterious, forgetting that the key to the mystery is within himself. One must free oneself from all impeding conditions or circumstances, which are different for everyone. Progress depends upon free will that is directed toward good."

"Augustine discussed the Trinity by means of an analogy with the three fundamental phases of personality—knowing, willing, and feeling—although ultimately he believed it to be a mystery beyond human comprehension. God is the perfection of knowledge, power, and good will. His attributes are omniscience, omnipotence, and ."

"I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification."

"Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers."

"I want to hear you laugh. Don't let the mystery go now."

"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”"

"It seems to me there is so much more to the world than the average eye is allowed to see. I believe if you look hard, there are more wonders in this universe than you could ever have dreamed of. It's colour! Colour that holds the key! I can hear the colours, listen to them. Every time I step outside, I feel nature is shouting at me. Come on! Come and get me! Come on! Capture my mystery!"

"Everybody is wonderin' what and where they all came from. Everybody is worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done. But no one knows for certain 'n' so it's all the same to me. I think I'll just let the mystery be."

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

"It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature."

"There are some mysteries so big that they will take the whole world to solve them."

"Reason quite properly rejects contradiction, but rationalism abhors mystery, which every heresy attempts in its own way to resolve."

"The angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: but in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets."

"I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers. … The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."

"The personal mystery of medieval man has been largely destroyed by capitalistic technicism and bourgeois scientism. There was always something mystical in personal creation as well as a "secret" in manual, artistic skills; convents and monasteries jealously kept the secret of their liquors; craftsmen had their secrets and so had doctors, alchemists, astrologers, and pharmacists in their more or less dark trades. Mystics, hermits, midwives, cooks, and violin builders harbored their secrets. Nature was full of unpenetrable mysteries and strange events; the scarcity of written documents furthered the growth of sagas, folklore, and legends. But not only man, nature, and life had their mysteries; even today we speak of the mysteries of the Rosary, of the Mass. In the Armenian Rite of the Catholic Church a veil is spread between the altar and audience during the Consecration of the Host. These mysteries on the other hand, personal as they might be, were far from creating walls between human beings who were by them not less magnetically attracted than by distance. Bodies are mutually attracted by nearness, knowledge, and pleasure but souls by distance, mystery, and suffering."

"We met in secret : mystery is to love Like perfume to the flower ; the maiden's blush Looks loveliest when her cheek is pale with fear."

"Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery."

"Tao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Tao. Names can be named, but not the Eternal Name. As the origin of heaven-and-earth, it is nameless: As "the Mother" of all things, it is nameable. So, as ever hidden, we should look at its inner aspects. As always manifest, we should look at its outer aspects. These two flow from the same source, though differently named; And both are called mysteries. The Mystery of mysteries is the Door of all essence."

"Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding."

"Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery. By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real. Yet mystery and reality emerge from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness born from darkness. The beginning of all understanding."

"The unwanting soul sees what's hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants. Two things, one origin, but different in name, whose identity is mystery. Mystery of all mysteries! The door to the hidden."

"Mysteries are irritated by facts."

"Mystery is an emotion which is repugnant to a political animal."

"Why else lead a life of bad banquet dinners, cigar smoke, camp chairs, foul breath, and excruciatingly dull jargon if not to avoid the echoes of what is not known."

"Sex and death have in common the fact that they are the two biological aspects of the mysterium tremendum. Mystery—defined here as a situation in which the data impinge on the problem—has its ultimate meaning in these two human experiences."

"Some things must needs gain in mystery before we can at all undertake to think upon them. Without mystery they are all obscure. Who can think, for instance, of the infinity of space without adding inconceivable things to his meditation?"

"The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it."

"A mystery is only a mystery for a time, for it relies upon a sense of wonder and curiosity to maintain its air, and that needs energy. If it is not revealed before the energy runs out, then the mystery becomes a conundrum, a problem, an annoyance, and a pestilence."

"Tao mystics never talk about God, reincarnation, heaven, hell. No, they don't talk about these things. These are all creations of human mind: explanations for something which can never be explained, explanations for the mystery. In fact, all explanations are against God because explanation de-mystifies existence. Existence is a mystery, and one should accept it as a mystery and not pretend to have any explanation. No, explanation is not needed – only exclamation, a wondering heart, awakened, surprised, feeling the mystery of life each moment. Then, and only then, you know what truth is. And truth liberates."

"Homage to you, O ye divine Lords of things, ye holy beings, whose seats are veiled! Homage to you, O ye Lords of Eternity, whose forms are concealed, whose sanctuaries are mysteries, whose places of abode are not known!"

"It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge."

"Ride, captain ride, upon your mystery ship, Be amazed, at the friends, you have here on your trip. Ride, captain ride, upon your mystery ship, On your way, to a world, that others might have missed."

"Can you think of any reason why someone would kill him?" The troll scratched his head. "Well, 'cos dey wanted him dead, I reckon. Dat's a good reason."

"Luke, this reminds me of a puzzle"

"A true gentleman leaves no puzzle unsolved"

"Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance."

"Just as nature abhors a vacuum, our minds abhor a mystery.""

"A prohibition and a mystery are the same—a locked room whose inscrutable door beckons us closer. Human curiosity impels us to open it, and the enlightenment we find inside—if it's truly worth our while—will invariably devastate us."

"But the divine mystery is inherent in the divine, a part of the nature of God, and can never disappear. And this means that it is still a mystery even to the mystic who has directly experienced it, nay, even to God Himself. That is why it is ineffable. The mystery and the ineffability of God are one and the same thing."

"Between the mysteries of death and life Thou standest, loving, guiding,— not explaining; We ask, and Thou art silent,— yet we gaze, And our charmed hearts forget their drear complaining; No crushing fate, no stony destiny! Thou Lamb that hast been slain, we rest in Thee."

"微乎微乎，至於無形；神乎神乎，至於無聲；故能為敵之司命。"

"There is no mystery whatever — only inability to perceive the obvious."

"Today for real mystery one has to look to cosmology and elementary particle physics."

"Whoever believes in a God at all, believes in an infinite mystery; and if the existence of God is such an infinite mystery, we can very well expect and afford to have many of His ways mysterious to us."

"There is no religion without mysteries. God Himself is the great secret of Nature."

"Where is the subject that does not branch out into infinity? For every grain of sand is a mystery; so is every daisy in summer, and so is every snow-flake in winter. Both upwards and downwards, and all around us, science and speculation pass into mystery at last."

"Augustine, the father of [[theologians], was walking on the ocean shore and pondering over the truth, "three distinct persons, not separate, but distinct; and yet but one God;" and he came upon a little boy that was playing with a colored sea-shell, scooping a hole in the sand, and then going down to the waves and getting his shell full of water and putting it into the hole. Augustine said, "What are you doing, my little fellow? " The boy replied, "I am going to pour the [sea]] into that hole." "Ah," said Augustine, "that is what I have been attempting. Standing at the ocean of infinity, I have attempted to grasp it with my finite mind.""

"Were there no mysteries in the Bible, we should doubt its being the transcript of the Eternal Mind. The "mystery of godliness" adapts it to our ruined race. Those mysteries of the Bible are like the mountains of the world; they give grandeur to the landscape and fertility to the soil."

"The mysteries of the Bible should teach us, at one and the same time, our nothingness and our greatness; producing humility, and animating hope. I bow before these mysteries. I knew that I should find them, and I pretend not to remove them. But whilst I thus prostrate myself, it is with deep gladness and exultation of spirit. God would not have hinted the mystery, had He not hereafter designed to explain it. And, therefore, are my thoughts on a far-off home, and rich things are around me, and the voices of many harpers, and the shinings of bright constellations, and the clusters of the cherub and the seraph; and a whisper, which seems not of this earth, is circulating through the soul, " Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.""

"The Bible tells me explicitly that Christ was God; and it tells me, as explicitly that Christ was man. It does not go on to state the modus or manner of the union. I stop, therefore, where the Bible stops. I bow before a God-man as my Mediator, but I own as inscrutable the mysteries of His person."

"In viewing the scheme of redemption, I seem like one viewing a vast and complicated machine of exquisite contrivance; what I comprehend of it is wonderful, what I do not, is, perhaps, more so still."

"Providence is a greater mystery than revelation."

"That great chain of causes, which, linking one to another, even to the throne of God Himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours."

"We know, and we feel, that the vast business of our redemption, arranged in the councils of the far-back eternity, and acted out amid the wonderings and throbbings of the universe, could not have been that stupendous transaction which gave God glory by giving sinners safety, if the inspired account brought its dimensions within the compass of a human arithmetic, or denned its issues by the lines of a human demarcation."

"The nature of Christ is, I grant it, from one end to another, a web of mysteries; but this mysteriousness does not correspond to the difficulties which all existence contains. Let it be rejected, and the whole world is an enigma; let it be accepted, and we possess a wonderful explanation of the history of man."

"Can any thing be more mysterious than the union of soul and body, unless it be the still greater mystery, which some have professed to believe, that matter can be so organized as to produce the amazing intellectual results which we witness in man? In believing our own existence we believe a mystery as great as any that the Christian religion presents."

"At some turning point of your life, when some great joy flashed, or some great shadow darkened upon you all at once; when some crisis that wanted an instantaneous decision appeared,— why, what regions of thought, purpose, plan, resolution, what wildernesses of desolate sorrow, and what paradises of blooming gladness, your soul has gone through in a moment."

"We live in the midst of infinite existence; and widely as we can see, and vastly as we have discovered, we have but crossed the threshold, we have but entered the vestibule of the Creator's temple. In this temple there is an everlasting worship of life, an anthem of many choruses, a hymn of incense that goes up forever."

"We are children shut up as yet in the narrow hollow of our native valley, with all the universe, outside the closely engirdling hills, for a great wonderland, of which we dream childish dreams, as the light of morning or evening kindles from beyond. "Laws of Nature" — what dost thou know of them, O man? Look out on the great miracles of nature, blooming in flowers and stars, away to the gates of the city of God, what dost thou know of its laws and wonders?"

"Children's literature cannot be created without a close attachment with the children and they should be given moral education through entertainment."

"Just creation of children's literature is not enough, we will have to be aware of the wrong spellings and sentence structures. Otherwise, the children wouldn't be satisfied."

"Children's literature often bears clear evidence of its political leanings. Robinson Crusoe (written for adults but appropriated by younger readers) was about a white man who taught a black man how to behave as much as possible like a decent Englishman. The Jungle Book stories feature Mowgli, who learns the law of the jungle then dominates all of them."

"Children's literature is not political? What rubbish. If it reflects the society we live in, it is political. For years, the only local books about black children featured them living in a round mud hut in a folktale or wandering around chatting up lions and leopards. Then our authors were gradually allowed by our publishers to dream a little, to speak from the heart."

"Children, parents, teachers and schools must always be involved. It is important that good habits and the pleasure of reading can and must be instilled in us when we are young."

"The very first humans anthropomorphized the trees and the sun. It's just what we do. I don't think children's literature is teaching children to graft human emotions onto animals."

"Entertainment written for children was no less grisly. In 1815 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published a compendium of old folktales that had gradually been adapted for children. Commonly known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the collection ranks with the Bible and Shakespeare as one of the bestselling and most respected works in the Western canon. Though it isn’t obvious from the bowdlerized versions in Walt Disney films, the tales are filled with murder, infanticide, cannibalism, mutilation, and sexual abuse—grim fairy tales indeed. Take just the three famous stepmother stories: During a famine, the father and stepmother of Hansel and Gretel abandon them in a forest so that they will starve to death. The children stumble upon an edible house inhabited by a witch, who imprisons Hansel and fattens him up in preparation for eating him. Fortunately Gretel shoves the witch into a fiery oven, and “the godless witch burned to death in a horrible way.” Cinderella’s stepsisters, when trying to squeeze into her slippers, take their mother’s advice and cut off a toe or heel to make them fit. Doves notice the blood, and after Cinderella marries the prince, they peck out the stepsisters’ eyes, punishing them “for their wickedness and malice with blindness for the rest of their lives.” Snow White arouses the jealousy of her stepmother, the queen, so the queen orders a hunter to take her into the forest, kill her, and bring back her lungs and liver for the queen to eat. When the queen realizes that Snow White has escaped, she makes three more attempts on her life, two by poison, one by asphyxiation. After the prince has revived her, the queen crashes their wedding, but “iron slippers had already been heated up for her over a fire of coals.... She had to put on the red-hot iron shoes and dance in them until she dropped to the ground dead.” As we shall see, purveyors of entertainment for young children today have become so intolerant of violence that even episodes of the early Muppets have been deemed too dangerous for them."

"I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant. Like all our evil propensities, the imagination will out. But if it is rejected and despised, it will grow into wild and weedy shapes; it will be deformed. At its best, it will be mere ego-centered daydreaming; at its worst, it will be wishful thinking, which is a very dangerous occupation when it is taken seriously."

"Children's literature is a key educational source in creating an inclusive culture."

"A 4-year-old reading a book about a talking bear, or in my case a bear that hugs trees, it's an innocent little fantasy. If a child loves picking up that book every night, I think the positive outweighs the negative - if there is any negative. I'd strongly argue there isn't."

"What mostly attracts me to children's literature is how complex it is We often have a misconception that children's literature is literature for adults with simpler language, and happy endings."

"Really, children's literature brings their fears and frustrations to life."

"This is one reason why children's literature is so important: it often begins with laughter."

"One of the most common epithets for children's books is 'fun'. It suggests a certain luxurious triviality: what's fun is all that's not serious. And certainly, many books are just that: escapes from the serious business of living."

"This is one of the triumphs of kids' books in general: a bonding in incomprehensibility."

"But all in all, the fun of children's books is often altruistic: it is a lesson in how to cope with an imperfect and often impenetrable life - and, as we chortle together, a form of intimacy."

"Plausibility, as the necessary brake and control element, has been our most essential guide."

"It is easy to argue persuasively the truism that the lessons of history are best derived from what actually happened, rather than from what nearly happened. It should be added, however, that what happened becomes more fully comprehensible in the light of the contending forces that existed at moments of decision. Understanding of the total historical setting is bound to contribute to a clearer view of the actual course of affairs."

"We look at this as the best of all possible worlds, but the French know it isn't, because most people speak English."

"Is the very essence of what science fiction is all about."

"Fiction is fact distilled into truth."

"I do not blame the words, for they are, as it were, choice and precious vessels, but I do deplore the wine of error which was poured out to us by teachers already drunk. And, unless we also drank we were beaten, without liberty of appeal to a sober judge."

"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality."

"People substituted writing (fiction) for what was once spiritual life, poetry (chaotic words) for actual ecstasies. Art constitutes a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world. A heavy price!"

"Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we [Europeans] shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future. The American way of life is spontaneously fictional, since it is a transcending of the imaginary in reality."

"The author of any work of fiction that is any good takes me so fully into his orbit that he becomes my friend; I think I'm his or her friend and I really want to be that kind of person. If on reflection I don't ask myself: "Is that really the kind of person I want to be?" "The kind of friend he or she has tried to make me—is that the kind of person I want to be?" then, of course, very serious deformations of the spirit can occur. The thing that can save us from that is to read a lot; then the deformations that one author will produce will be canceled by the others."

"Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality."

"Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it."

"Truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction."

"La fiction est le mensonge par lequel nous dison la vérité. (Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.)"

"But if stories are one of the ways we make sense of the world, they are also how we experience whatever doesn't make sense, whatever cannot be fully understood. Stories are how we stand in the presence of mystery. If mystery, the genre, is about finding the answers, then mystery, that elusive yet essential element of fiction, is about finding the questions."

"There aren't many answers, but there are plenty of compelling questions, many of which will lead you on wild goose chases (otherwise known as stories and novels) and sometimes you will catch a glimpse of a wild goose."

"The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous."

"You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of the author."

"As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots."

"When I come to fiction, both as a reader and as a writer, I wish for it to make visible something that, without it, I would perhaps have never seen. The reason that I might not have seen it isn't that it is so rare but that it can sometimes be nearly impossible to truly see that which is as omnipresent as air. The distance of art aklows me to see the emotional medium that surrounds us all."

"Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable."

"My fiction is not autobiography. I am not an exhibitionist. I do not show myself. I am not asking for forgiveness. I do not want to confess. But I have used everything I know—my life—to show what I believe must be shown so that it can be faced. The imperative at the heart of my writing—what must be done—comes directly from my life. But I do not show my life directly, in full view; nor even look at it while others watch."

"A plot is about things that happen. A story is about people who behave. To admire a story you must be willing to listen to the people and observe them."

"To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time."

"The story had no proper end, but reality rarely does. It is the province of fiction to tie up loose ends, to punish the guilty and reward the good, to join the lovers together and answer all questions."

"The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own."

"Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true."

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

"A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience."

"(You once said, "Fiction is NOT autobiography in a party dress." OK, then what is it?) NH: It's what happens after you grind up a bunch of your personally received input, everything from life experience to that book about spices you read ten years ago, compost it within your imagination, and then in that mulch grow something new. I think that could even apply to autobiographical fiction."

"A man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost."

"Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story."

"True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero — really look — and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life."

"The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words."

"It doesn’t have to be New York; it could have been Kokomo. I think the point is that having a fictional character come from a real place makes the character seem more real. When I was young, I loved to read Sherlock Holmes. And the fact that he lived on Baker Street in London, a real place, made me enjoy the stories more, with a greater feeling of authenticity."

"To merit serious consideration, fiction of any sort must satisfy one pragmatic requirement (making due allowance for the time and place when it was written): Does it convince the reader?"

"Good books tell the truth, even when they're about things that never have been and never will be. They're truthful in a different way."

"Literature ... seeks to entertain—and why is this? ... The reason, fundamentally, is that literature knows something that science does not: the human resistance to hearing the truth. ... The wisdom of literature arises mainly from its attention to this point. To overcome the resistance to truth, literature makes use of fictions that are images of truth."

"In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false."

"For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life."

"Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction—perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided."

"A superior man’s struggle in the world is not with exterior lions, trusts, margraves, policemen, rivals in love, German spies, radicals and tornadoes, but with the obscure, atavistic impulses within him—the impulses, weaknesses and limitations that war with his notion of what life should be. Nine times out of ten he succumbs. Nine times out of ten he must yield to the dead hand. Nine times out of ten his aspiration is almost infinitely above his achievement. The result is that we see him sliding downhill—his ideals breaking up, his hope petering out, his character in decay. Character in decay is thus the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."

"The hero of the inferior—i.e., the typically American—novel engages in no such doomed and fateful combat. His conflict is not with the inexplicable ukases of destiny, the limitations of his own strength, the dead hand upon him, but simply with the superficial desires of his elemental fellow men. He thus has a fair chance of winning—and in bad fiction that chance is always converted into a certainty. So he marries the daughter of the owner of the factory and eventually gobbles the factory itself. His success gives thrills to persons who can imagine no higher aspiration. He embodies their optimism, as the other hero embodies the pessimism of more introspective and idealistic men. He is the protagonist of that great majority which is so inferior that it is quite unconscious of its inferiority."

"Why should murder be so over-represented in our popular fiction, and crimes of a sexual nature so under-represented? Surely it cannot be because rape is worse than murder, and is thus deserving of a special unmentionable status. Surely, the last people to suggest that rape was worse than murder were the sensitively reared classes of the Victorian era … And yet, while it is perfectly acceptable (not to say almost mandatory) to depict violent and lethal incidents in lurid and gloating high-definition detail, this is somehow regarded as healthy and perfectly normal, and it is the considered depiction of sexual crimes that will inevitably attract uproars of the current variety."

"Nunc fabularum cur sit inventum genus, Brevi decebo. Servitus obnoxia, Quia, quae volebat, non audebat dicere, Affectus proprios in fabellas transtulit. Aesopi illius semita feci viam."

"Truth … does not deviate from its course, even though the end be unpleasant; whereas fiction, being a verbal fabrication, very readily follows a roundabout route, and turns aside from the painful to what is most pleasant."

"Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen."

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."

"Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures."

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."

"Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand."

"All fantasy should have a solid base in reality."

"In “Unbearable Weight”, I describe the postmodern body, increasingly fed on “fantasies of rearranging, transforming, and correcting, limitless improvement and change, defying the historicity, the mortality, and indeed, the very materiality of the body. In place of that materiality, we now have cultural plastic.” When I wrote these words, the most recent statistics, from 1989, listed 681,000 surgical procedures performed. In 2001, 8.5 million procedures were performed. They are cheaper than ever, safer than ever, and increasingly used, not for correcting major defects, but for “contouring” the face and body. Plastic surgeons seem to have no ethical problem with this. “I’m not here to play philosopher king,” says Dr. Randal Haworth in a “Vogue” interview; “I don’t have a problem with women who already look good and want to look perfect”. Perfect. When did “perfection” become applicable to a human body? The word suggest a Platonic form of timeless beauty-appropriate for marble, perhaps, but not for living flesh. We change, we age, we die. Learning to deal with this is part of the existential challenge-and richness-of mortal life. But nowadays, those who can afford to do so have traded the messiness and fragility of life, the vulnerability of intimacy, the comfort of human connection, for fantasies of limitless achievement, “triumphing” over everything that gets in the way, “going for the gold.” The Greeks called it hubris. We call it our “right” to be all that we can be."

"Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen."

"But films . . . it’s funny. People buy a ticket. That ticket is their transport to a fantasy which you create for them. Fantasyland, that’s all, and you make their fantasies live. Fantasies of love or hatred or whatever it is. People want their fantasies over and over. People who masturbate usually masturbate with, at the most, four or five fantasies. By and large. Most people like the same food and they like the same kind of music, they like the same kind of sexual fantasy for a period of time, then maybe it changes. As it is in children. Who is it? Bruce Lee. That’s the hero. Then you grow up and grow out of your Bruce Lee period, or your Picasso Blue Period, and go into another period. “But with kids, because they outpower us, because they have no representation, because they are so dependent, all they think about is power. Dinosaurs or the Million Dollar Man, because they feel so helpless, because they have no way out of it, except fantasy. Because they are only that tall. “And that’s all films are. Just an extension of childhood, where everybody wants to be freer, everybody wants to be powerful, everybody wants to be so overwhelmingly attractive that there’s just no doing anything about it. Or everybody wants to have comradeship and to be understood."

"Why fantasy? This question is more likely to be asked now than it was ten years ago, but the changing whims of fashion should not be confused with any fundamental change in human nature or truth. Fantasy is a component of the human psyche which has always existed and most likely always will exist, though the forms it adopts and the esteem in which it is held may vary. We spend a third of our lives in various realms of fantasy and whether or not we remember our experiences and include them in our reckoning of the world, they have a direct and significant effect on our everyday life."

"Your true adult, with fully-developed mind can enjoy fantasy whole-heartedly if it's written in adult words and thought-forms, because, being absolutely confident of his own mental capacity, he doesn't have any sense of embarrassment at being caught reading "childish stuff"....And every human being likes fantasy fundamentally. All we need is fantasy expressed in truly adult forms. Every author who honestly and lovingly does that makes a name on it. Lord Dunsany, Washington Irving, Stephen Vincent Benét."

"A long time ago, in a conference room far, far away... it was ordained that sword-and-sorcery movies would be the Next Big Thing. Just imagine crossing the fantasy worlds of JRR Tolkien and George Lucas! Mythic reverberations! Megabucks! Didn't work."

"There, Master Niketas," Baudolino said, "when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. ... There is nothing better than imagining other worlds," he said, "to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one."

"Thus, modern pleasure seeking according to Campbell is no longer related to the senses but to activities like daydreaming or fantasizing. The purpose of goods in this context is to act as props. They are the building blocs around which consumers create their pleasurable visions."

"Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it — I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying "That's the world." And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things."

"My fantasy since I was a small child was to dominate a dominating man. That turns me on more than anything, a man who does not want to be dominated—like Sean Connery, a really macho man. The kind of man who has no desire for submission. It’s truly perverse. It’s the power play: who has it, how long you have it for, and what you do with it."

"The Onion: How did your interest in fantasy first develop?"

"The Onion: How did you develop your particular visual style?"

""This sort of fiction, commonly called "sword and sorcery" by its fans, is not fantasy at its lowest, but it still has a pretty tacky feel; mostly it's the Hardy Boys dressed up in animal skins and rated R ( and with cover art by Jeff Jones, as likely as not). Sword and sorcery novels and stories are tales of power for the powerless. The fellow who is afraid of being rousted by those young punks who hang around his bus stop can go home at night and imagine himself wielding a sword, his potbelly miraculously gone, his slack muscles magically transmuted into those "iron thews" which have been sung and storied in the pulps for the last fifty years."

"She’d once told Devon, “I'm more interested in things that are real.” He’d been playing the game. Monitor-glow made his head a silhouette. He said, “What’s real is just an accident. No one designed reality to be compelling.” He gestured to the screen. “But a fantasy world is so designed. It takes the most interesting things that ever existed—like knights in armor and pirates on the high seas—and combines them with the most interesting things that anyone ever dreamed up—fire-breathing dragons and blood-drinking vampires. It’s the world as it should be, full of wonder and adventure. To privilege reality simply because it is reality just represents a kind of mental parochialism.”"

"It [fantasy literature] is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them."

"Good fantasy, unlike other genres, is more resilient to the tests of time, mainly because the ceaseless march of technology leaves less of a mark."

"Maeda Toshio suggests that aside the theme of human selfishness, the hard-core rape and tentacle porn with which this manga and animation have become synonymous, are "Fantasy service [extras] for the male readers, men are hen-pecked by their wives and their are wages are increasingly equal to women's so they like the rape scenes as they restore their sense of power.""

"Fantasies of any kind are distorted forms of thinking because they always involve twisting perception into unreality. Fantasy is a debased form of vision. Vision and revelation are closely related, while fantasy and projection are more closely associated because both attempt to control external reality according to false internal needs. Twist reality in any way, and you are perceiving destructively. Reality was lost through usurpation, which in turn produced tyranny... No fantasies are true. They are distortions of perception, by definition. They are a means of making false associations, and obtaining pleasure from them. Man can do this only because he is creative. But although he can perceive false associations, he can never make them real except to himself. Man believes in what he creates... [Eventually] fantasies become totally unnecessary as the wholly satisfying nature of reality becomes apparent..."

"Those who lack wisdom are children... Children do confuse fantasy and reality, and they are frightened because they do not know the difference. p. 132 What can be fearful but fantasy, and no-one turns to fantasy unless he despairs of finding satisfaction in reality. Yet it is certain that he will never find satisfaction in fantasy, so that his only hope is to change his mind about reality... The impossible can happen only in fantasy. When you search for reality in fantasies you will not find it. The symbols of fantasy are of the ego, and of these you will find many. But do not look for meaning in them. They have no more meaning than the fantasies into which they are woven. Fairy tales can be pleasant or fearful... Children may believe them, and so, for a while, the tales are true for them. Yet when reality dawns the fantasies are gone. Reality has not gone in the meanwhile. The Second Coming is the awareness of reality, not its return... reality is here. It belongs to you and me... and is perfectly satisfying to all of us."

"Harmless erotic fantasies are terrific, it’s the lousy ones you have to look out for—the harmful, destructive, morbid erotic fixations—real sadism, killing, blood-letting, torturing where the pleasure is in the victim’s actual pain, etc. Those are 100 per cent bad and I won’t have any part of them."

"The Thousand and One Nights, with its magnificent apparatus of genii and afrits, is the greatest work of fantasy that has ever been evolved by tradition, and given literary form. But it, alas, is not English, and has no English equivalent. The Western world does not seem to have conceived the necessity of fairy-tales for grown-ups — though it has been suggested that the modern detective story is an equivalent — and that is perhaps why it condemns them to a life of unremitted toil."

"I suppose the fantastic is what you imagine, but as soon as you do a fantastic thing, it's no longer fantastic, it becomes real."

"John Bell: What attracted you initially to heroic fantasy, a subgenre of fantastic literature that was once notorious for its less-than-enlightened racial attitude?"

"Fantasy is a distorted form of vision. Fantasies of any kind are distortions, because they always involve twisting perception into unreality. Actions that stem from distortions are literally the reactions of those who know not what they do. Fantasy is an attempt to control reality according to false needs. Twist reality in any way and you are perceiving destructively. Fantasies are a means of making false associations and attempting to obtain pleasure from them. But although you can perceive false associations, you can never make them real except to yourself. You believe in what you make. If you offer miracles, you will be equally strong in your belief in them. The strength of your conviction will then sustain the belief of the miracle receiver. Reality is "lost" through usurpation, which produces tyranny. As long as a single "slave" remains to walk the earth, your release is not complete."

"No fantasies are true. They are distortions of perception, by definition. They are a means of making false associations, and obtaining pleasure from them. Man can do this only because he is creative. But although he can perceive false associations, he can never make them real except to himself. Man believes in what he creates... [Eventually] fantasies become totally unnecessary as the wholly satisfying nature of reality becomes apparent..."

"Children do confuse fantasy and reality, and they are frightened because they do not know the difference. p. 132"

"What can be fearful but fantasy, and no-one turns to fantasy unless he despairs of finding satisfaction in reality. Yet it is certain that he will never find satisfaction in fantasy, so that his only hope is to change his mind about reality... The impossible can happen only in fantasy. When you search for reality in fantasies you will not find it. The symbols of fantasy are of the ego, and of these you will find many. But do not look for meaning in them. They have no more meaning than the fantasies into which they are woven. Fairy tales can be pleasant or fearful... Children may believe them, and so, for a while, the tales are true for them. Yet when reality dawns the fantasies are gone. Reality has not gone in the meanwhile. The Second Coming is the awareness of reality, not its return... reality is here. It belongs to you and me... and is perfectly satisfying to all of us. p. 209-210"

"It is said that science fiction and fantasy are two different things. Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable."

"Fantasy literature, in its broadest definition from "Cinderella" to "Beowulf" to Stephen Donaldson, is literature which makes deliberate use of something known to be impossible."

"Fantasy is a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent."

"The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy."

"The "hard" science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable … soon."

"It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves."

"Our writers, I believe, discern a resemblance between the world and their books. Through fantasy, they are saying something about life which could not be said within the naturalistic frame of reference."

"In 1977, Klaus Theweleit published a book in which he sought to understand the germination of fascism in interwar Germany. His method was to study the fantasy life of that era’s conservative revolutionaries, by reading the diaries, novels and letters of the men who joined the Freikorps militias, and fought against insurgent communists during the early days of the Weimar Republic."

"In the fantasies they committed to paper, the men associated the women they despised with floods of liquid and slime, and with dirt – substances that would threaten to overwhelm the defences of their ill-formed psyches."

"All fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction."

"Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self."

"Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. [...] For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form—it may be called fleeting or eternal—is in neither case the stuff that life is made of."

"A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become."

"Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction."

"An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing."

"All autobiography is self-indulgent."

"I don't think anybody should write his autobiography until after he's dead."

"An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' – it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely."

"Autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible."

"I think that some of our truths are things that are not dealt with in standard autobiography. I think that dreams are very important to women-and important to everybody's psyche-and to have access to those dreams is a great power. Also visions that we have about what we might do, also prayers-that's another "silent, secret" kind of thing. I think part of what we have to do is figure out a new kind of autobiography that can tell the truth about dreams and visions and prayers. I find that absolutely necessary for our mental and political health. I think the standard autobiography is about exterior things, like when you were born and what you participate in-big historical events that you publicly participate in-and those kinds of autobiographies ignore the rich, personal inner life. I feel that it's a mission for me to invent a new autobiographical form that truly tells the inner life of women, and I do think it's especially important for minority people, because we're always on the brink of disappearing. (1990)"

"It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore, I shall be short. It may be thought an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life; but this Narrative shall contain little more than the History of my Writings; as, indeed, almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations. The first success of most of my writing was not such as to be an object of vanity."

"Nothing is more difficult than writing an autobiography. What should be emphasized? Just what is of general interest? It is advisable, above all, to write honestly and dispense with any of the conventional introductory protestations of modesty. For if one is called upon to tell about one's life so as to make the events that made it what it became useful to the general public, it can mean only that one must have already wrought something positive in life, accomplished a task that people recognize. Accordingly it is a matter of forgetting that one is writing about oneself, of making an effort to abjure one's ego so as to give an account, as objectively as possible, of one's life in the making and of one's accomplishments."

"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

"I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't."

"A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor."

"While it is nice to describe a beautiful rose in full bloom, it would be incomplete without a description of everything—right from its roots, the stem, the manure and nutrients that have sustained it, the fresh and dried leaves as also the thorns, in order to conceptualize the beauty of that rose in all its dimensions. Likewise, for a human being’s biography, he needs to be presented ‘as is’ and not ‘as should be’—from head to toe, nothing more, nothing less, as transparent and true to reality as one can be. Everything that can be said or unsaid, that is embarrassing or praiseworthy has to be documented without inhibitions and fears. Of course given the social and political situation that I am writing these in, despite my will, some of the details are being suppressed a little. Also, it would be a breach of trust to reveal confidential details of renowned people whom I have had the good fortune of meeting and interacting with closely in my life. Still, I hold a promise that I have revealed all that needs to be revealed, with the least of colours and bias from my side."

"Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two."

"Don't give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can't express them. Don't analyse yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak."

"Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography."

"I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery, and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it."

"I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering, which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it."

"Writers collect things. We read magazines, we ride buses and eavesdrop on other people's conversations, we stop and read posters on telephone poles, we examine soup cans and old clothing stores and babies and pets and sewer covers and weather reports. We delve into ancient history, old gossip, rumors, hints of rumors, maps, brochures, irrelevant details, bad advice, good omens, lucky stars, and things that are nobody's business. In short, we are called to be witnesses. Things may happen, but unless someone takes note of it, it might not matter."

"“But you really are, you know.” This was said with intense earnestness. “I mean good, really good. I think it is wonderful to be an author like you. It must be almost like being God.” Graham stared blankly. “Not to editors, sister.” Sister didn’t get the whisper. She continued, “To be able to create living characters out of nothing; to unfold souls to all the world; to put thoughts into words; to build pictures and create worlds. I have often thought that an author was the most gloriously gifted person in all creation. Better an inspired author starving in a garret than a king upon his throne. Don’t you think so?” “Definitely,” lied Graham."

"Write to the mind and heart, and let the ear Glean after what it can."

"There is probably no hell for authors in the next world — they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this."

"And force them, though it was in spite Of Nature and their stars, to write."

"But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think."

"But every fool describes, in these bright days, His wondrous journey to some foreign court, And spawns his quarto, and demands your praise,— Death to his publisher, to him 'tis sport."

"And hold up to the sun my little taper."

"All I knew then was what I couldn't do. All I knew then was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper."

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. (9 December 1852)"

"Les sots font le texte, et les hommes d'esprit les commentaires."

"I like the idea of a literary patchwork, novel by novel, poem by poem, by different writers, mapping out an era, 'a continent' more and more thoroughly. No one writer can do it."

"There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured."

"But I did not explain to you the other insidious aspect of writing. There is no way to stop. Writers go on writing long after it becomes financially unnecessary...because it hurts less to write than it does not to write."

"Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, sequam Viribus."

"Tantum series juncturaque pollet."

"Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons."

"Nonumque prematur in annum."

"There are two things which I am confident I can do very well; one is an introduction to any literary work, stating what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most perfect manner."

"A man may write at any time if he set himself doggedly to it."

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."

"Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them. You, however, have not yet reached this stage of literary criticism."

"It is the rust we value, not the gold; Authors, like coins, grow dear, as they grow old."

"I would not be like those Authors, who forgive themselves some particular lines for the sake of a whole Poem, and vice versa a whole Poem for the sake of some particular lines. I believe no one qualification is so likely to make a good writer, as the power of rejecting his own thoughts."

""Tis hard to say if greater want of skill Appear in writing or in judging ill; But, of the two less dang'rous is th' offence To tire our patience than mislead our sense."

"Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true, But are not critics to their judgment too?"

"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance."

"In every work regard the writer's end, Since none can compass more than they intend."

"I hold to my old romantic belief that writers of all times and places belong to a noble fellowship; that although they are the voices of their own cultures and languages, they transcend these boundaries."

"what is writing if not a form of confession in disguise? No matter what the subject, all literary roads lead back to the self. The writer descends like a miner into the deepest shafts of her soul in order to unearth the blackest coals of her torment, or to retrieve the most glittering diamonds of her memories, and bring them back to the surface in the form of fictions that she wishes to share with the world."

"In an age when many people lived on less than two dollars a day, his income rose to as much as a hundred thousand dollars a year. He was the highest paid writer in America, and it was widely reported that his magazine contributions could earn a dollar a word. In fact, his last contract with Harper & Brothers guaranteed him only a third of that, but it was still a better deal than anyone else could have expected, and he always insisted on a strict word count from his editors, even going so far as to demand that hyphenated words be counted as two. Legend has it that when an admirer enclosed a dollar with a request for his autograph, he replied not with his signature but with the single word "Thanks," in accordance with his rumored rate."

"Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic."

"As was the case in the 1950s, the 1970s, and now in 2024, writers sometimes exist in perilous times, balancing careers between the tick and tock of the Right and the Left, when a single misstep or perceived endorsement can be a terminal mistake."

"Writers are engineers of human souls."

"Authors—essayist, atheist, novelist, realist, rhymester, play your part, Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of art."

"In every author let us distinguish the man from his works."

"I agree with Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini that the writer should serve his society. I differ with dictators as to how writers should serve."

"But you're our partic'lar author, you're our patron an' our friend, You're the poet of the cuss-word an' the swear."

"This dull product of a scoffer's pen."

"Ideas are free. But while the author confines them to his study, they are like birds in a cage, which none but he can have a right to let fly : for till he thinks proper to emancipate them, they are under his own dominion."

"The invention of an author is a species of property unknown to the common law of England. Its usages are immemorial; and the views of it tend to the benefit and advantage of the public with respect to the necessaries of life, and not to the improvement and graces of mind."

"Some write, confin'd by physic; some, by debt; Some, for 'tis Sunday; some, because 'tis wet; Another writes because his father writ, And proves himself a bastard by his wit."

"An author! 'tis a venerable name! How few deserve it, and what numbers claim! Unbless'd with sense above their peers refined, Who shall stand up dictators to mankind? Nay, who dare shine, if not in virtue's cause? That sole proprietor of just applause."

"For who can write so fast as men run mad?"

"Some future strain, in which the muse shall tell How science dwindles, and how volumes swell. How commentators each dark passage shun, And hold their farthing candle to the sun."

"And then, exulting in their taper, cry, "Behold the Sun;" and, Indian-like, adore."

"It is certainly not agreeable to natural justice that a stranger should reap the beneficial pecuniary produce of another man's work."

"A writer's fame will not be the less, that he has bread, without being under the necessity of prostituting his pen to flattery or party, to get it."

"He who engages in a laborious work (such, for instance, as Johnson's Dictionary) which may employ his whole life, will do it with more spirit if, besides his own Glory, he thinks it may be a provision for his family."

"The circumstance which gives authors an advantage above all these great masters, is this, that they can multiply their originals; or rather, can make copies of their works, to what number they please, which shall be as valuable as the originals themselves."

"Indeed, unless a man can link his written thoughts with the everlasting wants of men, so that they shall draw from them as from wells, there is no more immortality to the thoughts and feelings of the soul than to the muscles and the bones."

"A man of moderate Understanding, thinks he writes divinely: A man of good Understanding, thinks he writes reasonably."

"A man starts upon a sudden, takes Pen, Ink, and Paper, and without ever having had a thought of it before, resolves within himself he will write a Book; he has no Talent at Writing, but he wants fifty Guineas."

"And so I penned It down, until at last it came to be, For length and breadth, the bigness which you see."

"Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind."

"The book that he has made renders its author this service in return, that so long as the book survives, its author remains immortal and cannot die."

"Dear authors! suit your topics to your strength, And ponder well your subject, and its length; Nor lift your load, before you're quite aware What weight your shoulders will, or will not, bear."

"La pluma es lengua del alma."

"Apt Alliteration's artful aid."

"That writer does the most, who gives his reader the most knowledge, and takes from him the least time."

"Habits of close attention, thinking heads, Become more rare as dissipation spreads, Till authors hear at length one general cry Tickle and entertain us, or we die!"

"None but an author knows an author's cares, Or Fancy's fondness for the child she bears."

"So that the jest is clearly to be seen, Not in the words— but in the gap between; Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ, The substitute for genius, sense, and wit."

"Oh! rather give me commentators plain, Who with no deep researches vex the brain; Who from the dark and doubtful love to run, And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun."

"Aucun fiel n'a jamais empoisonne ma plume."

"Smelling of the lamp."

"Gracious heavens!" he cries out, leaping up and catching hold of his hair, "what's this? Print!"

"And choose an author as you choose a friend."

"The men, who labour and digest things most, Will be much apter to despond than boast; For if your author be profoundly good, 'Twill cost you dear before he's understood."

"When I want to read a book I write one."

"The author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children."

"The unhappy man, who once has trail'd a pen, Lives not to please himself, but other men; Is always drudging, wastes his life and blood, Yet only eats and drinks what you think good."

"All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having."

"For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world."

"The lover of letters loves power too."

"The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition."

"Like his that lights a candle to the sun."

"Envy's a sharper spur than pay: No author ever spar'd a brother; Wits are gamecocks to one another."

"The most original modern authors are not so because they advance what is new, but simply because they know how to put what they have to say, as if it had never been said before."

"One writer, for instance, excels at a plan, or a title-page, another works away the body of the book, and a third is a dab at an index."

""The Republic of Letters" is a very common expression among the Europeans."

"Their name, their years, spelt by the unlettered Muse."

"His [Burke's] imperial fancy has laid all nature under tribute, and has collected riches from every scene of the creation and every walk of art."

"Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word."

"But every little busy scribbler now Swells with the praises which he gives himself; And, taking sanctuary in the crowd, Brags of his impudence, and scorns to mend."

"Deferar in vicum vendentem thus et odores, Et piper, et quicquid chartis amicitur ineptis."

"Piger scribendi ferre laborem; Scribendi recte, nam ut multum nil moror."

"Saepe stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint Scripturus."

"Written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond."

"He [Milton] was a Phidias that could cut a Colossus out of a rock, but could not cut heads out of cherry stones."

"Each change of many-coloured life he drew, Exhausted worlds and then imagined new* Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign, And panting Time toil'd after him in vain."

"The chief' glory of every people arises from its authors."

"Tenet insanabile multo Scribendi cacoethes, et asgro in corde senescit."

"Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity."

"To write much, and to write rapidly, are empty boasts. The world desires to know what you have done, and not how you did it."

"If you once understand an author's character, the comprehension of his writings becomes easy."

"Perhaps the greatest lesson which the lives of literary men teach us is told in a single word* Wait!"

"Whatever hath been written shall remain, Nor be erased nor written o'er again; The unwritten only still belongs to thee* Take heed, and ponder well what that shall be."

"Look, then, into thine heart and write!"

"It may be glorious to write Thoughts that shall glad the two or three High souls, like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century."

"He that commeth in print because he woulde be knowen, is like the foole that commeth into the Market because he woulde be seen."

"He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite."

"No author ever drew a character, consistent to human nature, but what he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies."

"You do not publish your own verses, Laelius; you criticise mine. Pray cease to criticise mine, or else publish your own."

"Jack writes severe lampoons on me, 'tis said—But he writes nothing, who is never read."

"He who writes distichs, wishes, I suppose, to please by brevity. But, tell me, of what avail is their brevity, when there is a whole book full of them?"

"The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr."

"To write upon all is an author's sole chance For attaining, at last, the least knowledge of any."

"Prsebet mihi littera linguam: Et, si non liceat scribere, mutus ero."

"Scriptaferuntannos; scriptis Agamemnona nosti, Et quisquis contra vel simul arma tulit."

"Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipt me in ink, my parents', or my own? As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came."

"E'en copious Dryden wanted, or forgot, The last and greatest art—the art to blot."

"Whether the darken'd room to muse invite, Or whiten'd wall provoke the skew'r to write; In durance, exile, Bedlam, or the Mint, Like Lee or Budgel I will rhyme and print."

"Let him be kept from paper, pen, and ink; So may he cease to write, and learn to think."

"'Tis not how well an author says, But 'tis how much, that gathers praise."

"As though I lived to write, and wrote to live."

"Lis ont les textes pour eux, mais j'en suis fache pour les textes."

"Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio."

"Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears Moist it again, and frame some feeling line That may discover such integrity."

"Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well."

"Look in thy heart and write."

"The great and good do not die even in this world. Embalmed in books, their spirits walk abroad. The book is a living voice. It is an intellect to which one still listens."

"Ah, ye knights of the pen! May honour be your shield, and truth tip your lances ! Be gentle to all gentle people. Be modest to women. Be tender to children. And as for the Ogre Humbug, out sword, and have at him!"

"What the devil does the plot signify, except to bring in fine things?"

"So must the writer, whose productions should Take with the vulgar, be of vulgar mould."

"Smooth verse, inspired by no unlettered Muse."

"There are titles that are functional but still do the trick: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Kon-Tiki, The Godfather, Hawaii, Inside Asia. And then there are titles that contain a touch of music, of poetry, of magic: The Naked and the Dead; The Agony and the Ecstasy; Gone with the Wind; Song of Solomon; The Garden of Eden; The Sound and the Fury; Look Homeward, Angel; The Last Hurrah; From Here to Eternity; Listen! the Wind. There are titles that resonate in your mind, that call to you. Title intrigue was certainly a part of the great appeal of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mystery series. What youngster could resist titles like The Hidden Staircase, The Mystery at Lilac Inn, The Secret in the Old Attic, The Tower Treasure, Footprints Under the Window? There are memorable, off-beat titles with a twist that sparks our curiosity: Breakfast at Tiffany's, As I Lay Dying, Is Sex Necessary?, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Cheaper by the Dozen, and It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It. There are titles that through a single word, or an enchanted combination, capture a beauty, a feeling, everything about a time or place: Tales of the South Pacific, Lolita, The Guns of August. There are titles that prick our prurient interest — Jacqueline Susann was getting quite good at these before she passed away: The Love Machine, Once Is Not Enough. There are titles that a friend has to explain to you— "See, Mag, 'dolls' are pills, you know, uppers, downers, amphetamines." "Ohhh! Valley of the Dolls; I get it!" "Port- nay's Complaint I get it"— and so begins word of mouth. Some titles even become a part of our common parlance: Life Begins at Forty, The Power of Positive Thinking, Catch-22. "A good title is the title of a successful book," Raymond Chandler once commented. M After the fact, after the book is successful, its title seems the natural and obvious title for that particular book. But before the fact? That's another story."

"EPIGRAM, n. A short, sharp saying in prose or verse, frequently characterize by acidity or acerbity and sometimes by wisdom."

"What is an Epigram? a dwarfish whole, Its body brevity, and wit its soul."

"Report says that you, Fidentinus, recite my compositions in public as if they were your own. If you allow them to be called mine, I will send you my verses gratis; if you wish them to be called yours, pray buy them, that they may be mine no longer."

"The book which you are reading aloud is mine, Fidentinus; but, while you read it so badly, it begins to be yours."

"You are pretty,—we know it; and young,—it is true; and rich,—who can deny it? But when you praise yourself extravagantly, Fabulla, you appear neither rich, nor pretty, nor young."

""You are too free spoken," is your constant remark to me, Chœrilus. He who speaks against you, Chœrilus, is indeed a free speaker."

"You complain, Velox, that the epigrams which I write are long. You yourself write nothing; your attempts are shorter."

"What's this that myrrh doth still smell in thy kiss, And that with thee no other odour is? 'Tis doubt, my Postumus, he that doth smell So sweetly always, smells not very well."

"Since your legs, Phœbus, resemble the horns of the moon, you might bathe your feet in a cornucopia."

"In whatever place you meet me, Postumus, you cry out immediately, and your very first words are, "How do you do?" You say this, even if you meet me ten times in one single hour: you, Postumus, have nothing, I suppose, to do."

"If you wish, Faustinus, a bath of boiling water to be reduced in temperature,—a bath, such as scarcely Julianus could enter,—ask the rhetorician Sabinæus to bathe himself in it. He would freeze the warm baths of Nero."

"I could do without your face, and your neck, and your hands, and your limbs, and your bosom, and other of your charms. Indeed, not to fatigue myself with enumerating each of them, I could do without you, Chloe, altogether."

"Lycoris has buried all the female friends she had, Fabianus: would she were the friend of my wife!"

"You were constantly, Matho, a guest at my villa at Tivoli. Now you buy it—I have deceived you; I have merely sold you what was already your own."

"Do you wonder for what reason, Theodorus, notwithstanding your frequent requests and importunities, I have never presented you with my works? I have an excellent reason; it is lest you should present me with yours."

"You put fine dishes on your table, Olus, but you always put them on covered. This is ridiculous; in the same way I could put fine dishes on my table."

"You ask for lively epigrams, and propose lifeless subjects. What can I do, Cæcilianus? You expect Hyblæn or Hymethian honey to be produced, and yet offer the Attic bee nothing but Corsican thyme?"

"And have you been able, Flaccus, to see the slender Thais? Then, Flaccus, I suspect you can see what is invisible."

"When to secure your bald pate from the weather, You lately wore a cap of black neats' leather; He was a very wag, who to you said, "Why do you wear your slippers on your head?""

"See how the mountain goat hangs from the summit of the cliff; you would expect it to fall; it is merely showing its contempt for the dogs."

"Never think of leaving perfumes or wine to your heir. Administer these yourself, and let him have your money."

"Some learned writers … have compared a Scorpion to an Epigram … because as the sting of the Scorpion lyeth in the tayl, so the force and virtue of an epigram is in the conclusion."

"I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction. I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all of existence in an epigram."

"The diamond's virtues well might grace The epigram, and both excel In brilliancy in smallest space, And power to cut as well."

"Lumine Acon dextre,—capta est Leonilla sinistre, Et potis est forma vincere uterque dees: Blande puer, lumen quod habes concede sorori, Sic tu cæcus Amor, sic erit illa Venus."

"Unlike my subject, I will make my song. It shall be witty, and it shan't be long."

"This picture, plac'd the busts between Gives Satire all its strength; Wisdom and Wit are little seen While Folly glares at length."

"Sir Drake whom well the world's end knew Which thou did'st compass round, And whom both Poles of heaven once saw Which North and South do bound, The stars above would make thee known, If men here silent were; The sun himself cannot forget His fellow traveller."

"Thou art so witty, profligate and thin, At once we think thee Satan, Death and Sin."

"The qualities all in a bee that we meet, In an epigram never should fail; The body should always be little and sweet, And a sting should be felt in its tail."

"And he said, 'Sit down then, that I may give you my story from the beginning until now.' And he said, 'Give it me, I am already set down.'"

"The storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today "having counsel" is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story. ... Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out."

"A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour!"

"A story, in which native humour reigns, Is often useful, always entertains; A graver fact, enlisted on your side, May furnish illustration, well applied; But sedentary weavers of long tales Give me the fidgets, and my patience fails."

"“Heroic fantasy” is the name of a class of stories laid, not in the world as it is or was or will be, but as it ought to have been to make a good story. The tales collected under this name are adventure-fantasies, laid in imaginary prehistoric or medieval worlds, when (it’s fun to imagine) all men were mighty, all women were beautiful, all problems were simple, and all life was adventurous. In such a world, gleaming cities raise their shining spires against the stars; sorcerers cast sinister spells from subterranean lairs; baleful spirits stalk crumbling ruins; primeval monsters crash through jungle thickets; and the fate of kingdoms is balanced on the bloody blades of broadswords brandished by heroes of preternatural might and valor. The purpose of these stories is neither to teach the problems of the steel industry, nor to expose the defects in our foreign-aid program, nor yet to air the problems of the housewife. It is to entertain. These stories combine the color, gore, and action of the costume novel with the atavistic terrors and delights of the fairy tale. They furnish the purest fun to be found in fiction today. Heroic fantasy is escape reading in which you escape clear out of the real universe. But, come to think of it, these tales are not a bit more “unreal” than any of the hundreds of whodunnits wherein, after the stupid cops have fallen over their own big feet, the brilliant amateur—a private detective, a newspaper reporter, or a little old lady—steps in and solves the crime."

"Now, the main purpose of the storyteller was to entertain. He might also try to point a moral, or teach a fact, or expound his faith or philosophy, or startle his hearers by some novel idea or trick, or exorcise his private demons by putting them into story form. But all these purposes remained secondary to the main one: to entertain. The storyteller who put one of these other elements first soon found himself addressing empty air; and empty air would drop no drachmai or rupees into his cap. In the last century, alas, more and more storytellers have felt that they should place one of these secondary aims first, ahead of entertaining the reader. In the early years of this century we had a flood of novels of social problems—should an heiress marry her chauffeur? Then came stories exposing conditions in this or that industry, or baiting the booboisie. Then there were the proletarian novels, setting forth the evils of capitalism, and hailing the Great Red Dawn. More recently, we have had case studies of abnormal psychology thinly disguised as fiction. We have had stories that reduce human beings to animated sets of genitalia with legs and other parts vaguely attached. We have had stories whose heroes are human zeros—dull, pathetic little jerks with neither brains, brawn, nor character. We have had stories in which the words and sentences seem to be strung together at random, so that it would take a cryptographer to recover the meaning, if any… Now, these are all very well for those who like that sort of thing. Judging from sales figures, many do. However, some still like a story for the sake of the story. When they read fiction, they want first of all to be entertained—not instructed, uplifted, converted, incited, warned of the doom to come, or forced to admit what a monstrous clever fellow the writer is—but entertained. For those who put entertainment first, heroic fantasy offers it in its purest form. Of course, to enjoy a story of this kind, one needs some slight imagination. One must be able to suspend one’s disbelief in ghoulies and ghosties and other denizens of the worlds of fantasy. However, if the reader can believe in international spies who race about in super-powered cars from one posh gambling joint to another and find a beautiful babe awaiting them in bed at each stop, a few dragons and demons should not bother him."

"Studio heads and producers have been relatively quick to welcome back actors, directors, and writers who’ve been accused of harassment and assault, particularly when their status makes them seem irreplaceable. It’s a dual-edged message: Don’t abuse your power, but if you do, you’ll still have a career. Part of the confusion comes down to the fact that these men are seen as invaluable because the stories they tell are still understood to have disproportionate worth. When the slate of new fall TV shows is filled with father-and-son buddy-cop stories and prison-break narratives and not one but two gentle, empathetic examinations of male grief, it’s harder to imagine how women writers and directors might step up to occupy a sudden void. When television and film are fixated on helping audiences find sympathy for troubled, selfish, cruel, brilliant men, it’s easier to believe that the troubled, brilliant men in real life also deserve empathy, forgiveness, and second chances. And so the tangible achievements one year into the #MeToo movement need to be considered hand in hand with the fact that the stories being told haven’t changed much at all, and neither have the people telling them. A true reckoning with structural disparities in the entertainment industry will demand something else as well: acknowledging that women’s voices and women’s stories are not only worth believing, but also worth hearing. At every level."

"When thou dost tell another's jest, therein Omit the oaths, which true wit cannot need; Pick out of tales the mirth, but not the sin."

"Whether they believe the story or not, they delight to tell it."

"Tyler Weitzman, CEO of BlackSMS, likes to research social situations. As an undergrad at Stanford, he researched a method for conveying one’s achievements (or bragging, if you prefer!) while remaining humble and relatable. Through countless interviews of master storytellers, Tyler determined the ultimate structure for telling one’s story in a humble way: - Credit: “It could not have happened without [name the others involved].” - Hard Work: “We had to put in so much to make it happen, for example, [describe the hard work].” - Vulnerability: “It was most difficult for me when…” - Duty: “We were driven by our dream to [noble motive].” - Gratitude: “I am so proud and thankful that…” I encourage you to tell your story to a friend using this exact structure. See what comes out. Ask your friend for her reaction. I think you will be amazed."

"We now come to the most important of all the writer's problems. It is the very heart of story technique. And the proof is that the world and his wife go to the movies to be entertained, excited, and stirred emotionally in any pleasant manner. Hence, the presentation of emotions and the arousing of emotions are the main duty of the picture artist, whether he be the story writer, the director, or the actor. Probably nine out of ten stories which fail to sell in Hollywood contain some serious defect in emotional handling. It may be an error in the drawing of an emotion, or it may be the telling of events which cannot arouse pleasant emotions in the spectators. Few would- be authors have studied human feelings and emotions thoroughly. And still fewer are born with sensitivities which enable them to intuit this phase of man's nature, apart from all orderly observation and analysis."

"I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as 'twas said to me."

"I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part And each particular hair to stand on end, Like quills upon the fretful porpentine."

"Which his fair tongue—conceit's expositor— Delivers in such apt and gracious words, That aged ears play truant at his tales, And younger hearings are quite ravished."

"And thereby hangs a tale."

"We’ve been telling stories about the nature of each other’s characters for tens of thousands of years, starting back when we were still living in large, co-operative hunter-gatherer tribes. Recent research suggests human language evolved principally so that members of a tribe could swap “social information” about each other. In other words, we’d gossip. We’d keep track of our tribe-mates, closely tallying their behaviour and telling tales of their moral rights and wrongs. When these gossipy stories concerned a person behaving selflessly – when they put the tribe’s needs before their own – listeners would experience a wash of positive emotions and an urge to celebrate and reward them. But when they were told tales of someone being selfish, listeners would experience moral outrage. They’d be motivated to act – to punish them, whether by mocking and humiliating, violently attacking or ostracising them from the group, which would have been a death sentence. This is how we policed our tribes and kept them functioning as highly co-operative groups. Tales of people being selflessly heroic or selfishly villainous, and the joy and outrage they triggered, were crucial to human survival. We’re wired to enjoy them. Such stories are designed to ask and answer the dramatic question: who is this person really?"

"There’s another quality to ancient storytelling that’s still massively evident in tales we enjoy for pleasure. Studies of gossip in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes find that, just like stories in our most advanced cities, they are dominated by tales of moral infractions by high status people. We don’t like people who are more powerful. We fear and resent them. We’re much more likely to extend our empathy to characters who are low in the hierarchy – vulnerable, reluctant, trembling in the shadow of evil Goliath."

"In this spacious isle I think there is not one But he hath heard some talk of Hood and Little John, Of Tuck, the merry friar, which many a sermon made In praise of Robin Hood, his outlaws, and their trade."

"This story will never go down."

"Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten, Dass ich so traurig bin: Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn."

"Soft as some song divine, thy story flows."

"I hate To tell again a tale once fully told."

"And what so tedious as a twice-told tale."

"Quid rides? Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur."

"But that's another story."

"It is a foolish thing to make a long prologue, and to be short in the story itself."

"An' all us other children, when the supper things is done, We set around the kitchen fire an' has the mostest fun A-list'nin' to the witch tales 'at Annie tells about An' the gobble-uns 'at gits you Ef you Don't Watch Out!"

"For seldom shall she hear a tale So sad, so tender, yet so true."

"With a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner."

"In after-dinner talk, Across the walnuts and the wine."

"A tale in everything."

"What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!"

"What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers."

"Protect me from oil, water, insects and loose bonding, and above all, O Lord, protect me from falling into the hands of a fool."

"A good book is a good friend. It will talk to you when you want it to talk, and it will keep still when you want it to keep still – and there are not many friends who know enough for that."

"Shelving books improperly is as good as stealing them. It is actually much worse."

"One reader is better than another in proportion as he is able of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort."

"Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written...Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author...Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author, It is the highest respect you can pay him."

"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you."

"I am unbody’d by thy books, and thee, and in thy papers finde my extasie."

"How can one be in the limelight and still write? Books deserve compassion. They are delicate creatures born to be accepted or rejected as a whole; they can't endure dissection under the microscope of the pathologist. Most writers are as vulnerable as their work."

"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention."

"Worthy books Are not companions—they are solitudes: We lose ourselves in them and all our cares."

"Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?"

"The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author."

"[C]e voyage au pays de l'autre, qu'est un bon livre."

"The covers of this book are too far apart."

"Books were something that happened to readers. Readers were the victims of books."

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

"After Gutenberg, realms of everyday life once ruled and served by Memory would be governed by the printed page. ...A man could now refer to the rules of grammar, the speeches of Cicero, and texts of theology, , and morality without storing them in himself. The printed book... [was] superior in countless ways to the internal invisible warehouse in each person. ...When they were equipped with indexes, as ...sometimes ...by the sixteenth century, then the only essential feat of Memory was to remember the order of the alphabet. Before the end of the eighteenth century the... index... had become standard. The technology of Memory retrieval... played a much smaller role in the higher realms of... knowledge. Spectacular feats of Memory became mere stunts."

"I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library."

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme."

"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" He laughed. "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course."

"Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute."

"The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when I say all this."

"What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives."

"Don’t mind me, Miss Adams. You ever smell new books? Binding, pages, print. Like fresh bread when you’re hungry."

"We get no good By being ungenerous, even to a book, And calculating profits—so much help By so much reading. It is rather when We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth— 'Tis then we get the right good from a book."

"Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large,—where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning's dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books! At last, because the time was ripe, I chanced upon the poets."

"A 2003 book that investors can learn much from is Bull! by Maggie Mahar. Two other books I’d recommend are The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, and In an Uncertain World by Bob Rubin. All three are well-reported and well-written. Additionally, Jason Zweig last year did a first-class job in revising The Intelligent Investor, my favorite book on investing."

"Laws die, Books never."

"Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read."

"Some books are lies frae end to end."

"One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures."

"A love of books, of holding a book, turning its pages, looking at its pictures, and living its fascinating stories goes hand-in-hand with a love of learning."

"Every child in American should have access to a well-stocked school library. … An investment in libraries is an investment in our children's future."

"The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone."

"'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print; A book's a book, although there's nothing in't."

"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be."

"I learn more from the anatomy of an ant or a blade of grass...than from all the books which have been written since the beginning of time. This is so, since I have begun...to read the book of God...the model according to which I correct the human books which have been copied badly and arbitrarily and without attention to the things that are written in the original book of the Universe."

"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'"

"If a book come from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and authorcraft are of small amount to that."

"All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men."

"In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream."

"The true University of these days is a collection of Books."

"Putting the right book in the right kid’s hands is kind of like giving that kid superpowers. Because one book leads to the next book and the next book and the next book and that is how a world-view grows. That is how you nourish thought."

"There is no book so bad," said the bachelor, "but something good may be found in it."

"God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race."

"For out of olde feldes, as men seith, Cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere; And out of olde bokes, in good feith, Cometh al this newe science that men lere."

"There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person."

"There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book, and the tired man who wants a book to read."

"There is an undeniable correlation between functional illiteracy, poverty, and crime—in fact, eleven states predict their future need for prison cells based on the reading levels of their fourth graders. Books can change lives, yes, and so can the lack of them."

"Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them."

"Observe reader your old books, for they are the fountains out of which these resolutions issue."

"Books cannot always please, however good; Minds are not ever craving for their food."

"I sometimes think there is nothing so lovely as an artistically-designed book."

"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age."

"The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead. And even the books that do not last long, penetrate their own times at least, sailing farther than Ulysses even dreamed of, like ships on the seas. It is the author’s part to call into being their cargoes and passengers,—living thoughts and rich bales of study and jeweled ideas. And as for the publishers, it is they who build the fleet, plan the voyage, and sail on, facing wreck, till they find every possible harbor that will value their burden."

"Whatever we read from intense curiosity gives us a model of how we should always read."

"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Spanish Main... and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life."

"The book is one of the springs of creative individualism, that individualism which, in these uncertain times, remains the guardian angel of human society. For five hundred years the book has been, for the solitary mind, an incomparable instrument of uplift and liberation."

"Books are the friends of solitude. They develop individuality and freedom. In solitary reading a man who is seeking himself has some chance of finding himself."

"And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."

"Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry."

"There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten."

"The Bible is the most widely purchased, most thoroughly revered, and probably most broadly misunderstood book in the history of human civilization."

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers."

"Don't judge a book by its cover."

"Never read any book that is not a year old."

"'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear."

"In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity."

"Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head."

"HOW TO READ A BOOK 1. READ IT 2. CHANGE A LOT 3. REREAD IT"

"That place that does contain My books, the best companions, is to me A glorious court, where hourly I converse With the old sages and philosophers; And sometimes, for variety, I confer With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels."

"Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time."

"Ivy had always cherished books for the stillness they allowed in a world that valued fast, unforgiving progress regardless of the human expense; there was a magical link between words on the page and the vivid images that simultaneously unfolded in her mind."

"No one disputes the fine points of natural beauty—waterfall, wildflower—but books of any sort are sustained less through universal acclamation than through the excited, often contradictory, exchanges of their readers."

"Learning hath gained most by those books by which the Printers have lost."

"Some Books are onely cursorily to be tasted of."

"Reading anything less than 50 years old is like drinking new wine: permissible once or twice a year and usually followed by regret and a headache."

"Books are only what we want them to be; rather, what we read into them."

"... the notion that everybody has at least one good book in him is misleading. To draw out from one's own interior the material for a book, and to objectify it as a book, requires more literary skill than is given to most of us, and more courage than is discoverable in the whole history of indiscretion."

"Gone are the days of highlighting books featuring two dads or, as astonishing as it is to think about, the simple controversy of breaking out definitions of gay, bisexual, and transgender in a glossary. Now kids get dozens of sex and “gender” options to choose from, including queer, genderqueer, sapphic, panromantic, and two-spirit. They also get a new term to designate anyone who isn’t queer, “allocishet,” which the “Read With Pride” guide defines as, “people whose gender and sexuality are privileged by society.”"

"Books are the greatest and the most satisfactory of recreations. I mean the use of books for pleasure. Without books, without having acquired the power of reading for pleasure, none of us can be independent, but if we can read we have a sure defence against boredom in solitude."

"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas."

"What are my books but one plea against " man's inhumanity to man "—to woman—and to the lower animals?"

"This book is just right-- // I'm reading by flashlight deep into the night // Deliciously thirsty to see how it ends. // Books are such mind-thrilling // spine-tingling friends."

"Books give not wisdom where was none before, But where some is, there reading makes it more."

"Books are published with an expectation, if not a desire, that they will be criticised in reviews, and if deemed valuable that parts of them will be used as affording illustrations by way of quotation, or the like, and if the quantity taken be neither substantial nor material, if, as it has been expressed by some Judges, "a fair use" only be made of the publication, no wrong is done and no action can be brought."

"Wahrhaftig, der Umgang mit schlechten Büchern ist oft gefährlicher als mit schlechten Menschen."

"If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago."

"In every reading life, certain works are talismans, especially those read in early years."

"Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."

"You recollect what Hobbes used to say, "that if he had read as many books as other men, he should have been as ignorant as they," clearly implying that reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought."

"The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."

"I feel that peace has hardly been imagined. It is rarely dramatized in the theater, in the movies, even in books."

"Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books."

"Justin Wadlow, a professor at the French Université de Picardie Jules Verne (UPJV) in Amiens and a well-known scholar of comics, explained how books combining texts and comics as a new form of art have been used to spread deep ideas and raise awareness of social issues. He suggested that the essence of [the] Tai Ji Men culture may also be illustrated and presented to the world through these new media."

"Sometimes you need more than just one book, more than just one . Sometimes you need a whole . A book town is simply a small town, usually rural and scenic, full of bookshops and book-related industries. The movement started with in in Wales in the 1960s ..., picked up speed in the 1980s and is continuing to thrive in the new millenium."

"A man will turn over half a library to make one book."

"Just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. ... The great minds of the period—Milton, Francis_Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”"

"Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli."

"Gutenberg, your printing press has been violated by this evil book, Mein Kampf!"

"Reading, in contrast to sitting before the screen, is not a purely passive exercise. The child, particularly one who reads a book dealing with real life, has nothing before it but the hieroglyphics of the printed page. Imagination must do the rest; and imagination is called upon to do it. Not so the television screen. Here everything is spelled out for the viewer, visually, in motion, and in all three dimensions. No effort of imagination is called upon for its enjoyment."

"It is true that a book used to cost during the Middle Ages the equivalent of two to five hundred dollars whereas Gone With the Wind can be bought in editions of $1.49 and even less. Libraries were the privileges of a very few. But on the other side people enjoyed books far more, and the purchase of a book was a greater event in life than today the acquisition of a Cadillac. Nowadays one walks nonchalantly into a bookstore, pushes two and a half dollars over a counter, reads the book and forgets it sometimes in the suburban train."

"Any of us might live a long life or pass away tomorrow. I have come to believe that living your well-read life is measured not by the number of books read at the end of your life but by whether you are in book love today, tomorrow, and next week."

"A single book at the right time can change our views dramatically, give a quantum boost to our knowledge, help us construct a whole new outlook on the world and our life. Isn't it odd that we don't seek those experiences more systematically?"

"The first step to retention is to briefly review your book almost immediately after finishing it. It's easier if you've marked passages and taken notes in the margins and on the endpapers. You can then go back through your book, reminding yourself why you marked the particular passages and wrote the commentary you did. This may encourage you to add to your marginalia or write longer notes elsewhere."

"You will be surprised what psychological motivation there is in your having physical possession of the books you plan to read."

"There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire."

"Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it."

"When a book and a head collide and there is a hollow sound, is that always in the book?"

"A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get."

"The Council was right about one thing: books are only alive when they’re read. For books are seeds, and they grow in minds."

"The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books."

"What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticised for us!"

"Then I saw a great white throne and Him who sat upon it, from whose presence earth and heaven fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged, every one of them according to their deeds…"

"My mind is my weapon ... And a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge."

"When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me."

"A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."

"We teach and instruct one another only through writings; we learn to know nature and man only through writings. We work and relax, edify and amuse ourselves through overmuch writing. ... Everything is dead letter; the spirit of living conversation has vanished."

"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye."

"Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them."

"Deep vers'd in books, and shallow in himself."

"The Musalman General, who had already made his name a terror by repeated plundering expeditions in Bihar, seized the capital by a daring stroke... Great quantities of plunder were obtained, and the slaughter of the 'shaven headed Brahmans', that is to say the Buddhist monks, was so thoroughly completed, that when the victor sought for someone capable of explaining the contents of the books in the libraries of the monasteries, not a living man could be found who was able to read them."

"A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy."

"At home these men’s works [Kant, Schiller, Goethe] were kept in the bookcase with the green glass panes in Papa’s study, and Törless knew this bookcase was never opened except to display its contents to a visitor. It was like the shrine of some divinity to which one does not readily draw nigh and which one venerates only because one is glad that thanks to its existence there are certain things one need no longer bother about."

"A book is like a trunk tightly packed with things. At the customs an official's hand plunges perfunctorily into it, but he who seeks treasures examines every thread."

"I early formed the habit of buying books, and, thank God, I have never lost it. Authors living and dead — dead, for the most part — afford me my greatest enjoyment, and it is my pleasure to buy more books than I can read. Who was it who said, "I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul's reaching towards infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish"? Whoever it was, I agree with him (...)"

"Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier."

"Books, I was starting to discover, could be great points of reference, even if they weren’t true. Some of them had a way of telling things how they were, whether they were completely true or not."

"Affect not as some do that bookish ambition to be stored with books and have well-furnished libraries, yet keep their heads empty of knowledge; to desire to have many books, and never to use them, is like a child that will have a candle burning by him all the while he is sleeping."

"It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge."

"You will get little or nothing from the printed page if you bring it nothing but your eye."

"Literature is news that stays news."

"Even big collections of ordinary books distort space and time, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned second-hand bookshop, one of those that has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves that end in little doors that are surely too small for a full sized human to enter. The relevant equation is Knowledge = Power = Energy = Matter = Mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. Mass distorts space into polyfractal L-space, in which Everywhere is also Everywhere Else. All libraries are connected in L-space by the bookwormholes created by the strong space-time distortions found in any large collection of books. Only a very few librarians learn the secret, and there are inflexible rules about making use of the fact — because it amounts to time travel. The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: (1) Silence; (2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown, and (3) the nature of causality must not be interfered with."

"Books are for use."

"Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed."

"No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself. And the most objective books are the most deceptive. The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest."

"It seems to me that the dedication of a library is in itself an act of faith."

"To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future."

"Among democracies, I think through all the recorded history of the world, the building of permanent institutions like libraries and museums for the use of all the people flourishes. And that is especially true in our own land, because we believe that people ought to work out for themselves, and through their own study, the determination of their best interest rather than accept such so-called information as may be handed out to them by certain types of self-constituted leaders who decide what is best for them."

"The fact that a book, though interesting, is untrue, of course removes it at once from the category of history, however much it may still deserve to retain a place in the always desirable group of volumes which deal with entertaining fiction. But the converse also holds, at least to the extent of permitting us to insist upon what would seem to be the elementary fact that a book which is written to be read should be readable. This rather obvious truth seems to been forgotten by some of the more zealous scientific historians, who apparently hold that the worth of a historical book is directly in proportion to the impossibility of reading it, save as a painful duty."

"Personally the books by which I have profited infinitely more than by any others have been those in which profit was a by-product of the pleasure; that is, I read them because I enjoyed them, because I liked reading them, and the profit came in as part of the enjoyment."

"There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it."

"A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person—perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew each other. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic."

"All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value."

"Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate — with the best teachers — the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society."

"Books … are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."

"Be less concerned about the number of the books you read, and more about the good use you make of them. The best of books is the Bible."

"When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it."

"That roars so loud and thunders in the index."

"A beggar's book out-worths a noble's blood."

"Keep * * * thy pen from lenders' books, and defy the foul fiend."

"We turn'd o'er many books together."

"I had rather than forty shillings, I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here."

"That book in many's eyes doth share the glory, That in gold clasps locks in the golden story."

"O, let my books be then the eloquence And dumb presagers of my speaking breast; Who plead for love and look for recompense More than that tongue that more hath more express'd."

"Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnished me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom."

"And deeper than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown my book."

"And in such indexes (although small pricks To their subsequent volumes) there is seen The baby figure of the giant mass Of things to come at large."

"You shall see them on a beautiful quarto page, where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin."

"What this town has not given her the book will provide: a sheep, a wilderness of new solutions"

"Sikander burnt all books the same wise as fire burns hay. All the scintillating works faced destruction in the same manner that lotus flowers face with the onset of frosty winter."

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."

"When we turn to secular literature it is impossible to name a list of books that will fit each individual need. Writers and educators have attempted to do so intermittently since Sir John Lubbock first published his list of “One Hundred Best Books.” Usually such a list is of little value except to reflect the writer’s personality."

"Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life."

"When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness."

"Reading books is for losers who are afraid to learn from life. So they try and learn from the life OTHERS have lived. But you never REALLY learn unless you lived it. You must feel it to believe it. Books are a total waste of time. Education for cowards."

"Sometimes she thought she only dreamed about dancing while her real life was lived in books. She could get lost in a book, in being someone else, in feeling amplified, complicated, her simple self fancied up with new sensations, new ideas and perceptions. In books she had family, community, a place in history; she had travels and explorations, struggle and achievement."

"But most of all, it seems to me now, has been the courage to know and to sense my feelings that has come, slowly, from the emotionally charged silent films at the old library at first and then later from the poems and novels and histories and biographies and how-to-do-it books that I have read. All of those books—even the dull and nearly incomprehensible ones—have made me understand more clearly what it means to be a human being. And I have learned from the sense of awe I at times develop when I feel in touch with the mind of another, long-dead person and know that I am not alone on this earth. There have been others who have felt as I feel and who have, at times, been able to say the unsayable."

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

"A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East."

"No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading now, or surrender yourself to self-ignorance."

"He touched other books, scanned other volumes, all old friends, all holding for him some special grace, some captured memory. He read a story for the hundredth time and enjoyed it as if he had read it but once. He fingered worn bindings and yellowed pages, blinking as his eyes refused their duty until he had had a surfeit of reading and put away the books and sat, staring through the high windows at the late-afternoon sky beyond."

"A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever."

"Un livre est une bouteille jetée en pleine mer sur laquelle il faut coller cette étiquette: attrape qui peut."

"If you go home with someone and they don't have books, don't fuck them."

"Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book."

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written."

"Putting books on an inaccessible platform is nearly as effective at destroying books as the shredder."

"I told the Englishman that my alma mater was books, a good library. Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read—and that’s a lot of books these days. If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity—because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about."

"People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book."

"Unlearned men of books assume the care, As eunuchs are the guardians of the fair."

"A dedication is a wooden leg."

"Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation, as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn."

"That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit."

"Homo unius libri."

"Books are delightful when prosperity happily smiles; when adversity threatens, they are inseparable comforters. They give strength to human compacts, nor are grave opinions brought forward without books. Arts and sciences, the benefits of which no mind can calculate, depend upon books."

"You, O Books, are the golden vessels of the temple, the arms of the clerical militia with which the missiles of the most wicked are destroyed; fruitful olives, vines of Engaddi, fig-trees knowing no sterility; burning lamps to be ever held in the hand."

"But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation."

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."

"Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books."

"The Wise (Minstrel or Sage,) out of their books are clay; But in their books, as from their graves they rise. Angels—that, side by side, upon our way, Walk with and warn us!"

"Hark, the world so loud, And they, the movers of the world, so still!"

"We call some books immortal! Do they live? If so, believe me, TIME hath made them pure. In Books, the veriest wicked rest in peace."

"All books grow homilies by time; they are Temples, at once, and Landmarks."

"There is no Past, so long as Books shall live!"

"In you are sent The types of Truths whose life is THE TO COME; In you soars up the Adam from the fall; In you the FUTURE as the PAST is given— Ev'n in our death ye bid us hail our birth;— Unfold these pages, and behold the Heaven, Without one grave-stone left upon the Earth."

"Some said, John, print it, others said, Not so; Some said, It might do good, others said, No."

"Go now, my little book, to every place Where my first pilgrim has but shown his face. Call at their door: if any say "Who's there?" Then answer thou "Christiana is here.""

"In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him."

"It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours."

"Go, litel boke! go litel myn tregedie!"

"O little booke, thou art so unconning, How darst thou put thyself in prees for dred?"

"And as for me, though than I konne but lyte, On bokes for to rede I me delyte, And to hem yeve I feyth and ful credence, And in myn herte have hem in reverence So hertely, that ther is game noon. That fro my bokes maketh me to goon, But yt be seldome on the holy day. Save, certeynly, when that the monthe of May Is comen, and that I here the foules synge, And that the floures gynnen for to sprynge, Farwel my boke, and my devocion."

"It is saying less than the truth to affirm that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals, we may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return to it with the same healthful appetite."

"Books should, not Business, entertain the Light; And Sleep, as undisturb'd as Death, the Night."

"The monument of vanished mindes."

"Give me a book that does my soul embrace And makes simplicity a grace— Language freely flowing, thoughts as free— Such pleasing books more taketh me Than all the modern works of art That please mine eyes and not my heart."

"Books should to one of these four ends conduce, For wisdom, piety, delight, or use."

"He ate and drank the precious words, His spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, Nor that his frame was dust. He danced along the dingy days, And this bequest of wings Was but a book. What liberty A loosened spirit brings!"

"There is no frigate like a book To take us lands away, Nor any coursers like a page Of prancing poetry. This traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of toll; How frugal is the chariot That bears a human soul."

"Golden volumes! richest treasures, Objects of delicious pleasures! You my eyes rejoicing please, You my hands in rapture seize! Brilliant wits and musing sages, Lights who beam'd through many ages! Left to your conscious leaves their story, And dared to trust you with their glory; And now their hope of fame achiev'd, Dear volumes! you have not deceived!"

"Homo unius libri, or, cave ab homine unius libri."

"Not as ours the books of old— Things that steam can stamp and fold; Not as ours the books of yore— Rows of type, and nothing more."

"The spectacles of books."

"Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."

"Books are the best things, well used: abused, among the worst."

"In every man's memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views."

"There are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories."

"We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise."

"The princeps copy, clad in blue and gold."

"Now cheaply bought, for thrice their weight in gold."

"How pure the joy when first my hands unfold The small, rare volume, black with tarnished gold."

"Books are necessary to correct the vices of the polite; but those vices are ever changing, and the antidote should be changed accordingly—should still be new."

"In proportion as society refines, new books must ever become more necessary."

"I armed her against the censures of the world; showed her that books were sweet unreproaching companions to the miserable, and that if they could not bring us to enjoy life, they would at least teach us to endure it."

"I have ever gained the most profit, and the most pleasure also, from the books which have made me think the most: and, when the difficulties have once been overcome, these are the books which have struck the deepest root, not only in my memory and understanding, but likewise in my affections."

"Thou art a plant sprung up to wither never, But, like a laurell, to grow green forever."

"The foolishest book is a kind of leaky boat on a sea of wisdom; some of the wisdom will get in anyhow."

"Dear little child, this little book Is less a primer than a key To sunder gates where wonder waits Your "Open Sesame!""

"Medicine for the soul."

"Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book."

"Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book!"

"My desire is … that mine adversary had written a book."

"Blest be the hour wherein I bought this book; His studies happy that composed the book, And the man fortunate that sold the book."

"Pray thee, take care, that tak'st my book in hand, To read it well; that is to understand."

"When I would know thee * * * my thought looks Upon thy well-made choice of friends and books; Then do I love thee, and behold thy ends In making thy friends books, and thy books friends."

"In omnibus requiem quæsivi Et non inveni Nisi seorsim sedans In angulo cum libello."

"Every age hath its book."

"Books which are no books."

"A book is a friend whose face is constantly changing. If you read it when you are recovering from an illness, and return to it years after, it is changed surely, with the chance in yourself."

"A wise man will select his books, for he would not wish to class them all under the sacred name of friends. Some can be accepted only as acquaintances. The best books of all kinds are taken to the heart, and cherished as his most precious possessions. Others to be chatted with for a time, to spend a few pleasant hours with, and laid aside, but not forgotten."

"The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, nor defence."

"The pleasant books, that silently among Our household treasures take familiar places, And are to us as if a living tongue Spake from the printed leaves or pictured faces!"

"Leaving us heirs to amplest heritages Of all the best thoughts of the greatest sages, And giving tongues unto the silent dead!"

"Books are sepulchres of thought."

"All books are either dreams or swords, You can cut, or you can drug, with words. * * * * * * My swords are tempered for every speech, For fencing wit, or to carve a breach Through old abuses the world condones."

"If I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I would answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, and that is a book honestly come by."

"Gentlemen use books as Gentlewomen handle their flowers, who in the morning stick them in their heads, and at night strawe them at their heeles."

"That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it."

"As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book."

"You importune me, Tucca, to present you with my books. I shall not do so; for you want to sell, not to read, them."

"Un livre est un ami qui ne trompe jamais."

"Within that awful volume lies The mystery of mysteries!"

"Distrahit animum librorum multitudo."

"Their books of stature small they take in hand, Which with pellucid horn secured are; To save from finger wet the letters fair."

"Nor wyll suffer this boke By hooke ne by crooke Printed to be."

"Some books are drenched sands, On which a great soul's wealth lies all in heaps, Like a wrecked argosy."

"When St. Thomas Aquinas was asked in what manner a man might best become learned, he answered, "By reading one book." The homo unius libri is indeed proverbially formidable to all conversational figurantes."

"Go, little Book! From this my solitude I cast thee on the Waters,—go thy ways: And if, as I believe, thy vein be good, The World will find thee after many days. Be it with thee according to thy worth: Go, little Book; in faith I send thee forth."

"Books, the children of the brain."

"Aquinas was once asked, with what compendium a man might become learned? He answered "By reading of one book.""

"Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they have passed."

"But every page having an ample marge, And every marge enclosing in the midst A square of text that looks a little blot."

"Thee will I sing in comely wainscot bound And golden verge enclosing thee around; The faithful horn before, from age to age Preserving thy invulnerable page. Behind thy patron saint in armor shines With sword and lance to guard the sacred lines; Th' instructive handle's at the bottom fixed Lest wrangling critics should pervert the text."

"Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge."

"They are for company the best friends, in Doubt's Counsellors, in Damps Comforters, Time's Prospective the Home Traveller's Ship or Horse, the busie Man's best Recreation, the Opiate of idle Weariness, the Mindes best Ordinary, Nature's Garden and Seed-plot of Immortality."

"O for a Booke and a shadie nooke, eyther in-a-doore or out; With the grene leaves whisp'ring overhede, or the Streete cries all about. Where I maie Reade all at my ease, both of the Newe and Olde; For a jollie goode Booke whereon to looke, is better to me than Golde."

"Books, we know, Are a substantial world, both pure and good: Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness will grow."

"Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books, Or surely you'll grow double; Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble?"

"I fear the man of one book."

"I got a glimpse into the uses of a certain kind of criticism this past summer at a writers' conference – into how the avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D. I saw how it was possible to gain a chair of literature on no qualification other than persistence in nipping the heels of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck."

"Literature is one facet of a culture. The significance of a literature can be best understood in terms of the culture from which it springs, and the purpose of literature is clear only when the reader understands and accepts the assumptions on which the literature is based. A person who was raised in a given culture has no problem seeing the relevance, the level of complexity, or the symbolic significance of that culture’s literature. We are all from early childhood familiar with the assumptions that underlie our own culture and its literature and art. Intelligent analysis becomes a matter of identifying smaller assumptions peculiar to the locale, idiom, and psyche of the writer."

"Literature must, of necessity, express and articulate the deepest perceptions, relationships, and attitudes of a culture, whether it does so deliberately or accidentally."

"The question I propose to consider is in what way one may justify the study of English on cultural and disciplinary, and not merely on sentimental or utilitarian grounds. My own conviction is that if English is to be thus justified it must be primarily by what I am terming the discipline of ideas."

"Literature is the question minus the answer."

"The only test of a work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own."

"While the guardians of “literary” fiction still give each other prizes and writers can still achieve stardom and create good work, the fact remains that it is a movement that has lost all its creative force as a movement."

"The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science."

"A beautiful literature springs from the depth and fulness of intellectual and moral life, from an energy of thought and feeling, to which nothing, as we believe, ministers so largely as enlightened religion."

"A trial and a literary text do not aim at the same kind of conclusion, nor do they strive toward the same kind of effect. A trial is presumed to be a search for truth, but, technically, is a search for a decision, and thus, in essence, it seeks not simply truth but in a finality: a force of resolution. A literary text is, on the other hand, a search for meaning, for expression, for heightened significance, and for symbolic understanding. I propose to make use of this difference in literary and legal goals, by reading them “across” each other and against each other."

"Literature is prophetic-life often lives up to fiction"

"Republic of letters."

"I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive."

"It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing."

"In [[Soviet Union|Soviet [Union] times]], it was almost obligatory for authors of articles and books regardless of their subject matter to include a citation or two from Lenin and the current CPSU leader. That practice [had] largely disappeared along with the USSR, but in the last decade, the Vyorstka news agency says, Putin has brought it back, yet another revenant from the past."

"Don't you give up on this [library] card. Because books can be solid gold. Yeah, the great ones have gotten us through the nights for centuries. Just give a writer an hour to hook you and if he can't wish him the best of luck and find someone else."

"It is to Rome and Roman literature that we must turn to find the earliest examples of affectionate and confidential letters passing between members of the same family, and between friends of the same tastes and sympathies."

"I remember some artists who said this world isn't worth anything, that it is a pigsty, that we are going nowhere, that God is dead, and all those things. Bad literature is this. To expose your navel, to tell how you drank your morning coffee amid general disgust, with everything around you rotting. While the world is dying, I drink my coffee. Or I perform my little sex acts. This is old-fashioned. One must cross this neurotic curtain."

"When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language."

"The second essay, by Dominick LaCapra, also takes up the theme of repetition as it asks what makes a legal trial worth remembering. Focusing on the nineteenth-century trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire for “outrage to public and religious morality and to good morals,” LaCapra demonstrates that the aesthetic standard used to judge these writers demanded that a work of art provide “purely symbolic and ‘spiritual’ resolution of the problems it explored.” Flaubert and Baudelaire were, in essence, subject to criminal prosecution for their commitment to literary realism that led them to flour some of the representational taboos of their time. Yet in LaCapra’s view their trials were not, in a strict sense, show trials whose purpose was to instill a broad, collective memory. They were not designed to recall from the past events that “insistently made demands on collective and individual remembrance and thus necessitated entry into the public sphere.” They were instead intended to create a memory of the consequences that would attach to writers who transgressed public norms and whose “deviant” work might have a broad public impact. LaCapra worries about the use of law for such memorial purposes, and he notes the continuing controversy over whether histiography has the function of transmitting memory. In his own view history has two related objectives, namely the adjudication of truth claims about the past and the transmission of memory. It is, however, the memory of the criminal trial, especially those in which literature is put on trial, to which LaCapra calls out attention. Such trials raise questions about how literary texts can be read in particular contexts, and they call on us to remember the situatedness and contingency of all readings. When faced with literary texts that are in some sense transgressive, law, LaCapra suggests, will read through the lens of its own reconstructions of the past-through precedent-and, as a result, will read in a regulative, normalizing way. Law will seek to protect the literary canon and repress the more disconcerting features of literature in order to make it a vehicle for the promotion of conventional social values. Yet this kind of reading, a reading that serves to commemorate convention, defeats literature. LaCapra calls for a kind of literary privilege in which what the law may justifiably prohibit in social life should not be prohibited in art or literature. Art could thus serve society as a safe haven for exploration and experimentation."

"LaCapra notes that in the trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire, while both the prosecution and the defense insisted on a view of the role of literature in society that was “conventionalizing, normalizing, and domesticating,” this was especially true of the defense. In each trial the defense of literature denied its experimental or transgressive character and insisted on its role in commemorating conventional values. Although Flaubert and Baudelaire put into practice immanent critique of the social and literary conditions of their time, this critique could find no voice in a court of law. This essay calls on us to remember the trials of these two great writers for what they reveal about the “variable historical manner in which literary’ experimentation . . . is bound up with broader political, legal, and sociocultural issues in the production, reception, and critical reading of texts.” With respect to the place of memory, LaCapra suggests that law, at least the law of crime, resists the transmission of particular understandings of literature, for example, of its transgressive, experimental value. Those seeking to use law to memorialize such understandings are regularly defeated. Unlike Felman, who sees law insatiating memory in uncanny ways, LaCaptra finds no such subversive potential in the trials of literature. He insists that law constrains memory and remembrance in a relatively predictable manner and points to the limits to which law as archive can be put."

"The importance of distinguishing between literary and genre fiction is highlighted by scholarship that draws from both literary studies and psychological theory. Genre fiction is defined primarily by its focus on a particular topic and reliance on relatively formulaic plots. By contrast, literary fiction is defined more by its aesthetic qualities and character development than its focus on plot or a particular set of topics and themes. This distinction is recognized by publishers, who routinely list it as a publishing category; and by critics, who award separate prizes for specific genres (e.g., the Hugo awards for fantasy and the Nebula awards for science fiction), as well as prizes for general literary quality (e.g., the PEN/O. Henry Prize and the National Book Award for fiction). The distinction has also been put in terms of what attracts readers to the work: entertainment and escape for genre fiction, understanding and engagement for literary fiction (Petite, 2014). Empirical research appears to bear this out. A study of adult readers found that readers of primarily literary, romance, or mystery fiction value different features. Readers of literary fiction, compared to the others, indicated greater appreciation for figurative language (e.g., metaphor), multiple plot lines, many possible meanings, opportunities for imaginative interpretation, several shifting perspectives, and character development (Miesen, 2004). Although there are certainly exceptions and ambiguous cases, industry, critics, and ordinary readers appear to agree that literary fiction generally affords greater opportunities for interpretive engagement than more formulaic genres."

"Today’s literature is prescriptions written by patients."

"You see all these white heroes, everybody is white, all the literature classes—your Shakespeare, your poetry — everybody’s white, and you start to feel less than."

"Literature is analysis after the event."

"Comics, they say, are not literature – adventure strips lack artistic form, mental substance, and emotional appeal to any but the most moronic of minds. Can it be that 100,000,000 Americans are morons? Possibly so; but there seems to be a simpler explanation. Nine humans out of ten react first with their feelings rather than with their minds; the more primitive the emotion stimulated, the stronger the reaction. Comics play a trite but lusty tune on the C natural keys of human nature. They rouse the most primitive, but also the most powerful, reverberations in the noisy cranial sound-box of consciousness, drowning out more subtle symphonies. Comics scorn finesse, thereby incurring the wrath of linguistic adepts."

"La république des lettres."

"Many psychologists have treated literature as a whole as a mere vehicle of withdrawal from the harsh realities of existence: forgetful of the fact that literature of the first order, so far from being a mere pleasure device, is a supreme attempt to face and encompass reality-an attempt beside which a busy working life involves a shrinkage and represents a partial retreat."

"…that, I think, is really where lots of literature comes from. It really comes, not from knowing so much, but from not knowing. It comes from what you're curious about. It comes from what obsesses you. It comes from what you want to know."

"I think that’s what literature is about; it’s the struggle for truth. It’s the struggle for what you don’t understand"

"It is right for you, young men, to enrich yourselves with the spoils of all pure literature; but he who would make a favorite of a bad book, simply because it contained a few beautiful passages, might as well caress the hand of an assassin because of the jewelry which sparkles on its fingers."

"Literature is news that stays news."

"In all the good Greek of Plato I lack my roastbeef and potato.A better man was Aristotle, Pulling steady on the bottle. I dip my hat to Chaucer, Swilling soup from his saucer,And to Master Shakespeare Who wrote big on small beer.The abstemious Wordsworth Subsisted on a curd’s-worth,But a slick one was Tennyson, Putting gravy on his venison.What these men had to eat and drink Is what we say and what we think.The influence of Milton Came wry out of Stilton.Sing a song for Percy Shelley, Drowned in pale lemon jelly,And for precious John Keats, Dripping blood of pickled beets.Then there was poor Willie Blake, He foundered on sweet cake.God have mercy on the sinner Who must write with no dinner,No gravy and no grub, No pewter and no pub,No belly and no bowels, Only consonants and vowels."

"The quest to discover a definition for "literature" is a road that is much traveled, though the point of arrival, if ever reached, is seldom satisfactory. Most attempted definitions are broad and vague, and they inevitably change over time. In fact, the only thing that is certain about defining literature is that the definition will change. Concepts of what is literature change over time as well."

"When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written."

"The job of literature is to change the reader’s soul. I don’t want my readers just to enjoy themselves. I want them to go through some sort of experience that might change themselves."

"One cannot help feeling that its guardians sometimes miss the point of literature, which is not to cut gems of flashing and exquisite rarity but to communicate, to convey a meaning, an art, a story, a fantasy, even a mystery, to someone."

"During the last quarter of a century all the authority associated with the function of spiritual guidance ... has seeped down into the lowest publications. ... Between a poem by Valery and an advertisement for a beauty cream promising a rich marriage to anyone who used it there was at no point a breach of continuity. So as a result of literature’s spiritual usurpation a beauty cream advertisement possessed, in the eyes of little village girls, the authority that was formerly attached to the words of priests."

"The invention of printing added a new element of power to the race. From that hour, in a most especial sense, the brain and not the arm, the thinker and not the soldier, books and not kings, were to rule the world; and Weapons forged in the mind, keen-edged, and brighter than the sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and battle-axe. […] Books,—lighthouses erected in the great sea of time,—books, the precious depositories of the thoughts and creations of genius,—books, by whose sorcery times past become time present, and the whole pageantry of the world's history moves in solemn procession before our eyes;—these were to visit the firesides of the humble, and lavish the treasures of the intellect upon the poor. Could we have Plato, and Shakespeare, and Milton, in our dwellings, in the full vigor of their imaginations, in the full freshness of their hearts, few scholars would be affluent enough to afford them physical support; but the living images of their minds are within the eyes of all. From their pages their mighty souls look out upon us in all their grandeur and beauty, undimmed by the faults and follies of earthly existence, consecrated by time."

"Literature is the thought of thinking Souls."

"Literary Men are * * * a perpetual priesthood."

"I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself."

"But, indeed, we prefer books to pounds; and we love manuscripts better than florins; and we prefer small pamphlets to war horses."

"Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor."

"Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth."

"Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry."

"The death of Dr. Hudson is a loss to the republick of letters."

"A man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world."

"There is first the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is—to teach; the function of the second is—to move, the first is a rudder, the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy."

"La mode d'aimer Racine passera comme la mode du café."

"We cultivate literature on a little oat-meal."

"The great Cham of literature. [Samuel Johnson.]"

"The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible."

"Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."

"The poetry is the Earth, charming; The river, flowing from lofty mountains; Nature, a young woman and a heavenly plant with blossoming flowers, slinking in the garden of the mind."

"You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket."

"To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

"The crown of literature is poetry."

"Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular."

"Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: 'memorable speech'."

"Poetry is itself a thing of God; He made his prophets poets; and the more We feel of poesie do we become Like God in love and power,—under-makers."

"All poetry is misrepresentation."

"As part of the spring ritual of National Poetry Month, poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses of the American People. The motto of ARF's National Poetry Month is: "Poetry's not so bad, really.""

"Poetry must find ways of breaking distance. … all languages are dialects that are made to break new grounds."

"A poet rises while falling. It’s the rising in the falling that makes him rise posthumously."

"Poetry worthy of its name is measured by the degree of abstention, of refusal, it implies, and that negative component of its nature must be maintained as essential: it balks at tolerating anything already seen, heard, agreed upon, at using anything already used except when diverting it from its previous function."

"By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan. In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential. For what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely the gift of speech. Poetry is not a form of entertainment and in a certain sense not even a form of art, but it is our anthropological, genetic goal. Our evolutionary, linguistic beacon."

"You speak As one who fed on poetry."

"Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing."

"Some rhyme a neebor's name to lash; Some rhyme (vain thought!) for needfu' cash; Some rhyme to court the countra clash, An' raise a din; For me, an aim I never fash; I rhyme for fun."

"For rhyme the rudder is of verses, With which, like ships, they steer their courses."

"Some force whole regions, in despite O' geography, to change their site; Make former times shake hands with latter, And that which was before come after; But those that write in rhyme still make The one verse for the other's sake; For one for sense, and one for rhyme, I think's sufficient at one time."

"Nor florid prose, nor honied lies of rhyme, Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime."

"I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence—this may look like affectation—but it is my real opinion—it is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake"

"A certain lady went to see the show, Her real name I know not, nor can guess, And so we'll call her Laura, if you please, Because it slips into my verse with ease."

"Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is."

"Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it) and thus need not fear its loss."

"Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought."

"For there is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed."

"Poets often have a perception that gives their words the validity of science. So the English poet Francis Thompson said nearly a century ago, ‘Thou canst not stir a flower/Without troubling of a star.’ But the poet's insight has not become part of general knowledge."

"If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry."

"Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity... but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'..."

"Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver."

"I think that we're beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem."

"I think that poetry, in general, after a certain point in a poet's life, has to do with the acknowledgment of mortality. And even the most joyful poems have to do with, "Yes, let's not forget that life is brief." Once I started dealing with grief in poetry, I discovered that I had found my way to poetry. I think that so many young poets are only writing about the joy of love and that sort of thing and don't understand that the great poetry, like Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle" and like Wordsworth's "Intimations" and "Tintern Abby," has all been a moment when the poet realizes that "this is my time to express what I have gathered in this brief life"... it was poetry and literature that led me to understand that to stifle someone else's emotional life is almost immoral, that you have to let people continue to live, and that grief is one of the great shackles. If you let grief hinder you, you can become trapped in it."

"…poetry = the best words in their best order."

"An undevout poet is an impossibility."

"No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language"

"There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know."

"If you examine the highest poetry in the light of common sense, you can only say that it is rubbish; and in actual fact you cannot so examine it at all, because there is something in poetry which is not in the words themselves, which is not in the images suggested by the words 'O windy star blown sideways up the sky!' True poetry is itself a magic spell which is a key to the ineffable."

"I'm a poetry–skipper myself. I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country — make it any other two persons. This doesn't mean that I hate poetry. I don't feel that strongly about it. It only means that those who wish to communicate with me by means of the written word must do so in prose."

"For a man to become a poet, he must be in love... or miserable."

"For me, poetry has been an exercise in freedom. Freedom is like a muscle-the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. Poetry can give you a sense of choice. It's free on every level. Language and memory have no price tags on them. You have limitless choices-in form, language, subject matter-that spill over into life."

"To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie — True Poems flee —"

"Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild."

"Doeg, though without knowing how or why, Made still a blundering kind of melody; Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin, Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in; Free from all meaning whether good or bad, And in one word, heroically mad."

"A poem is a naked person . . . some people say that I am a poet."

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

"It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

"Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history."

"Language is fossil poetry."

"Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words."

"I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds."

"Poetry's a mere drug, Sir."

"The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation."

"Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry."

"Always fatuity, vulgarity, as soon as human passion is touched. [...] Just as some poetry is of the eye (form, colour) and some of the ear, so Keats is of the palate. Not only has he constant reference to its pleasures, but the general sensation after reading him is one of tasting. 'What's the harm?' Well, taste for some reason or the other can't carry one far into the world of beauty—that reason being perhaps that though you don't want comradership there you do want the possibility of comradership, and A cannot swallow B's mouthful by any possibility:....and this exclusiveness (to maunder on) also attaches to the physical side of sex though not the least to the spiritual."

"A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words."

"Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down."

"The person who spends his time criticizing the play around him will never write poetry. He will write criticism."

"The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom."

"I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation."

"Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement."

"The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries, and though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian philosopher and historian — the humble listener — there has been a Divine melody running through the song which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come."

"Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary."

"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does."

"Poetry is the only place where you get an individual person telling his subjective truth, what he really thinks, as distinct from what he wants people to think he thinks. [...] After all, the people making political speeches, they’re writing prose, if not poetry, and they are trying to get a little flowery language in there, but the language is shifty, and the language is manipulative, and people who are advertising, or even doing ordinary mass-media, are still inhibited and can’t say what they really think, but the poet can say what he really thinks, authentically, and that’s the advantage, and it’s longer-lasting than the immediate radio-broadcast or television-broadcast, because a poem is like a radio that can broadcast continually, for thousands of years."

"Poetry is the culture of a people. We are poets even when we don’t write poems; just look at our life, our rhythms, our tenderness, our signifying, our sermons and our songs."

"Poetry is a game of loser-take-all."

"If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money."

"A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end."

"Philosophy is antipoetic. Philosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start, he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of a head loses his personal identify and becomes a number in some government scheme: if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority voting, which smothers personal views."

"Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality."

"Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."

"Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race."

"If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone."

"Each of us is descended from poetry ancestors. It’s the same for any art, any occupation. There is a lineage of style, knowledge and culture passed from generation to generation, one artist to another. Ultimately all poetry is related in the family tree of poetry…"

"All that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it."

"How we have been pulled from the land! And how poetry has worked hard to set us free, uncage us, keep us from split tongues that mimic the voices of our captors. It returns us to our land. Poetry is a string of words that parades without a permit. It is a lockbox of words to put an ear to as we try to crack the safe of language, listening for the right combination, the treasure inside. It is life resonating. It is sometimes called Prayer, Soothsaying, Complaint, Invocation, Proclamation, Testimony, Witness."

"Poetry is a form of magic for me."

"For dear to gods and men is sacred song. Self-taught I sing; by Heaven and Heaven alone, The genuine seeds of poesy are sown."

"another wonderful thing that happens in Chinese language, not now maybe, but in classical times, was a poet is somebody who can write and sing and paint his poem. See how integrated that is? All those parts of your body are connected. You're not fragmented. Even now, the poets still do calligraphy."

"no verses which are written by water-drinkers can please, or be long-lived"

"Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out … and perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure."

"A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters."

"Poetry, with its brevity and precision, is a natural training ground, or whetstone, for critical thinking. All of its devices, in addition to the highly accessible metaphor and image, are consummate communicators and powerful persuaders, for good or ill—mood, tone, personification, diction, allusion, symbol, and so many more—and all, when diligently pursued engender, or sharpen, critical thought, food for the brain as well as the heart."

"Sir, what is Poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is: but it is not easy to tell what it is."

"Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason."

"The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights."

"Still may syllables jar with time, Still may reason war with rhyme, Resting never!"

"What’s important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That’s what it means."

"Poetry helps me to imagine freedom...Poetry can help lift the ceiling from our brains so that we can imagine liberation."

"In a world dominated by the discourses of globalization a book of translations forces us to reflect and meditate, and it alerts us not only to differences but also connections and intersections among communities, religions and ethnicities. That there are similarities and there are difference. Both are in fact important. Context shapes the way one lives. The subject matter too could be different. But the meditative dimension, the concern with belonging, and with identity and rootedness are similar."

"In Poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I am from their centre. 1st. I think Poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by Singularity—it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance—2nd Its touches of Beauty should never be half way thereby making the reader breathless instead of content: the rise, the progress, the setting of imagery should like the Sun come natural natural too him—shine over him and set soberly although in magnificence leaving him in the Luxury of twilight—but it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it—and this leads me on to another axiom. That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all."

"If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live."

"When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment."

"Love has its priests in the poets, and one hears at times a poet's voice which worthily extols it."

"For me, the prospect of expression through poetry transforms solitary silence and an empty page into sheer pleasure. I feel unafraid, knowing I can break all the rules, invent my own forms. No matter what persona I take on, my voice remains accessible and recognizable. There is no artifice, no pose, no sense that I have to transform myself into someone else. As a poet, I remain comfortably disrespectful. I experiment, take risks which sometimes work and sometimes don't."

"what, in essence, is poetry. To me it seems that it is a magical transporter through time and space because it manages to contain the present, the past, even the future. Poetry is also the only literary medium that allows for the deformation of reality in service of artistic vision while at the same time endowing that vision with a marked purpose defined by all the attributes of reality."

"I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. … Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree."

"1968 was one of those rare times in America when poetry seemed to matter. Telephone service in New York City in 1968 offered a “dial-a-poem.” A government pilot program that year sent poets around the country to public high schools to give readings and discussions. The response was wildly enthusiastic. In Detroit, poet Donald Hall was trapped in a hallway at Amelia Earhart Junior High School by excited students shouting, “Say us a poem!” Obligingly he shouted one, but then the crowd had doubled with new arrivals and he had to read it again."

"Poetry: play on words."

"The imagination, which is the source of poetry, has in every country been the beginning as well as the ornament of civilization. It civilizes because it refines."

"We deny that poetry is fiction; its merit and its power lie alike in its truth:"

"To connect the external object with the internal emotion is the sweetest privilege of poetry."

"Poetry is the immortality of earth: where shall we look for our noblest thoughts, and our tenderest feelings, but in its eternal pages?"

"There's a reason for poetry... Poetry is a very nonlinear use of language, where the meaning is more than just the sum of the parts. And science requires that it be nothing more than the sum of the parts. And just the fact that there's stuff to explain out there that's more than the sum of the parts means that the traditional approach, just characterizing the parts and the relations, is not going to be adequate for capturing the essence of many systems that you would like to be able to do. That's not to say that there isn't a way to do it in a more scientific way than poetry, but I just like the feeling that culturally there's going to be more of something like poetry in the future of science."

"Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance"

"Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself"

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding."

"For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."

"Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before."

"The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom."

"Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors."

"The form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women."

"As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines."

"A poem should not mean But be."

"Bless poetry books that cross oceans in battered envelopes, bearing small flames of words."

"As for me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because this self-lust has a delightful dying fall in my soul."

"poetry is an elusive thing that can neither be hidden nor locked away."

"Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"

"Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface. There are epochs, however, when mankind, not satisfied with the present, yearning like the ploughman for the abyssal strata of time, thirsts for the virgin soil of time. Revolution in art inevitably leads to Classicism, not because David reaped the harvest of Robespierre, but because that is what the earth desires."

"Many a bard's untimely death Lends unto his verses breath; Here's a song was never sung: Growing old is dying young."

"Oh, I didn't realize that you wrote poetry I didn't realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry, Mr. Shankly"

"In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets."

"The quality of poetry is not strained. It has not to abide our repeated questions. It tests and is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry but the hearer that is to be judged."

"I never wanted to be a poet. I just wanted to be a human being. Anyone who wants to be a poet is out of his mind. Either you are one or you are not. Most poets are not poets. To be a real artist is a unique and valuable asset to this planet."

"My unpremeditated verse."

"Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter…the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing"

"Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignore most people."

"The bards were feared. They were respected, but more than that they were feared. If you were just some magician, if you'd pissed off some witch, then what's she gonna do, she's gonna put a curse on you, and what's gonna happen? Your hens are gonna lay funny, your milk's gonna go sour, maybe one of your kids is gonna get a hare-lip or something like that—no big deal. You piss off a bard, and forget about putting a curse on you, he might put a satire on you. And if he was a skillful bard, he puts a satire on you, it destroys you in the eyes of your community, it shows you up as ridiculous, lame, pathetic, worthless, in the eyes of your community, in the eyes of your family, in the eyes of your children, in the eyes of yourself, and if it's a particularly good bard, and he's written a particularly good satire, then three hundred years after you're dead, people are still gonna be laughing, at what a twat you were."

"Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason."

"Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to stay that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a , one should read."

"Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can't choose, the one that writes itself. Not a message that comes at the end of the poem, more like a pathological condition that deforms every word – a resonance, a manner of speaking, a nervous tic, a pressure. And this invisible subject only shows up when you're speaking the language that you speak when no one is there to correct or applaud you. Remembering that language is the whole skill of writing well."

"It is not difficult to understand the resistance to the idea of poetry as a performing art. For years our concept of poetry and its presentation has been dominated by male academic ivory towerites. We have been conditioned to find poetry isolated and secluded from the masses of people, a pursuit only to be understood and especially enjoyed by those who possess trained minds and favored breeding. It has long been touted as an art form to be admired for its stylistic machinations with severe limitations on its concepts and subject matter...In the 1960s, things began to change. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets and began voicing other concerns. Concerns that touched our lives: a war in a far-away pace with an unknown people; the separateness of America's ethnic minorities and inequality of her perceptions of them; the role of women and the rape of our minds and bodies. The poets and poetry also changed. The concerns voiced by people in the streets appeared on pages clutched by angry hands. The audiences and the forums also began changing. Women poets started leaving the university reading rooms and coffeehouses and began going to women's centers. The move toward consciousness had created a different need and a new way to approach poetry and its presentation. Women's centers, which in many instances were represented by a single night allocated to women in the backroom of a coffeehouse or YWCA, started sponsoring poetry reading. Women began applying the lessons learned in consciousness-raising work and to their approach to other writers. The competitiveness and the one-upmanship of the male poetry scene was replaced by a joyful sharing of ideas and a commitment to sisterhood."

"I do physics in order to earn my living, and I do poetry in order to keep alive."

"Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared."

"The only thing worse than poetry? Abstract poetry, which exists solely to make students feel stupid and professors feel smug."

"Poetry changes with every generation, but it does not improve or progress. It just changes its styles, trappings and some of its obsessions, but we can still enjoy Sappho and Homer; they are today's news as much as when they were written or recited."

"Poems told me there were other people who felt the way I felt. That was validation for the person I was. Poems can mean survival."

"I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty."

"Poetry emerging from a poet enters into the reader only when it comes within the readers’ 'sphere of intellect."

"A reader cannot take poetry by expanding it beyond his/her consciousness, rather can take by shrinking it within."

"There exists a chance of every poem getting changed while reaching every reader. This ‘getting changed’ is a form of ‘getting translated’, in a way. So, every assimilation of any poem is a translation."

"A good poem cannot be written with one's mind on the earth. Though one has to write poems about the earth and existence, one cannot write poems while staying grounded. To write an outstanding poem, a flight to the heights of transcendence is needed. However, a person cannot always remain in that elevated state. When one descends, they touch the earth and write ordinary stuff."

"Poetic Justice, with her lifted scale, Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs, And solid pudding against empty praise."

"A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along."

"What woful stuff this madrigal would be, In some starv'd hackney sonneteer or me! But let a lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens! how the style refines."

"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own."

"It is very probable that the Hindenburg Line to which the defence of our traditions retired as a result of the onslaughts of the last century will be blown up in the near future. If this should happen a mental chaos such as man has never experienced may be expected. We shall then be thrown back...upon poetry. It is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos."

"Who needs poetry? All of us do. Poetry has always been the voice of the inner self, the carrier of revelations, dreams, and visions that often defy expression in ordinary prose."

"Lord but I dislike poetry. How can anyone remember words that aren’t put to music?"

"Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know."

"There is one kind of knowledge-infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry."

"Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry"

"Despite all the lying hype about “diversity” and “openness” and “inclusion,” American poetry was becoming a closed corporation for a rather narrow bandwidth of sociopolitical opinion."

"The English language is a magnificent treasure bequeathed to us by centuries of literary achievement. And you’re going to write all your poems using the Fourth-Grade Basal Vocabulary List? Grow up."

"He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life."

"Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air. … Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. … Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. … Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment."

"A poem works or fails to work; no amount of argufying can convert an experienced reader."

"And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name."

"I had rather be a kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same metre ballet-mongers; I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn'd, Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree; And that would set my teeth nothing on edge, Nothing so much as mincing poetry: 'Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag."

"O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention."

"The elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy."

"I was not born under a rhyming planet."

"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

"…poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

"Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."

"if you read the poems of someone somewhere you know a lot more about that country than you know if you just study its crops or weather conditions."

"all poems belong to anyone who loves them."

"… ζωγραφίαν ποίησιν σιωπῶσαν προσαγορεύει [sc. ὁ Σιμωνίδης], τὴν δὲ ποίησιν ζωγραφίαν λαλοῦσαν."

"I was promised on a time To have reason for my rhime; From that time until this season I received nor rhime nor reason."

"Poetry is an overlooked and underrated kind of art."

"The idea of poetry in our Navajo world, speaking — Ya’ jił’tí’i’gí’ — Diníbizaad — is related to the whole — one’s whole life, the whole community. It’s not separated the way poetry is in Western society."

"You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick...You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in."

"A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him."

"My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it."

"Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech."

"The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to."

"If books represent the heart of the Guru Buddha, then poetry represents a beautiful song in the Guru Buddha's heart."

"The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see—it is, rather, a light by which we may see—and what we see is life."

"If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere — probably more than the rest of the world combined. Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations — many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too."

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

"He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise."

"It is difficult to get the news from poems"

"Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a ‘poetic mood’. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one’s thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself."

"I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."

"There is in Poesy a decent pride, Which well becomes her when she speaks to Prose, Her younger sister."

"Poetry is a constructed conversation on the frontier of dreaming."

"The fatal facility of the octosyllabic verse."

"In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column: In the pentameter aye falling in melody back."

"Prose—words in their best order;—poetry—the best words in their best order."

"Made poetry a mere mechanic art."

"Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme? Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtle round your ruin'd shed?"

"Why then we should drop into poetry."

"When the brain gets as dry as an empty nut, When the reason stands on its squarest toes, When the mind (like a beard) has a "formal cut,"— There is a place and enough for the pains of prose; But whenever the May-blood stirs and glows, And the young year draws to the "golden prime," And Sir Romeo sticks in his ear a rose,— Then hey! for the ripple of laughing rhyme!"

"'Twas he that ranged the words at random flung, Pierced the fair pearls and them together strung."

"The true poem is the poet's mind."

"For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem."

"It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem."

"The finest poetry was first experience."

"Oh love will make a dog howl in rhyme."

"What is a Sonnet? 'Tis the pearly shell That murmurs of the far-off, murmuring sea; A precious jewel carved most curiously; It is a little picture painted well. What is a Sonnet? 'Tis the tear that fell From a great poet's hidden ecstasy; A two-edged sword, a star, a song—ah me! Sometimes a heavy tolling funeral bell."

"To write a verse or two, is all the praise That I can raise."

"A verse may finde him who a sermon flies, And turn delight into a sacrifice."

"Versibus exponi tragicis res comica non vult."

"Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto."

"Versus inopes rerum, nugæque canoræ."

"Ubi plura nitent in carmine, non ego paucis Offendar maculis, quas aut incuria fudit, Aut humana parum cavit natura."

"Nonumque prematur in annum."

"Wheresoe'er I turn my view, All is strange, yet nothing new: Endless labor all along, Endless labor to be wrong: Phrase that Time has flung away; Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and elegy, and sonnet."

"These are the gloomy comparisons of a disturbed imagination; the melancholy madness of poetry, without the inspiration."

"Facit indignatio versum."

"The poetry of earth is never dead; * * * * * The poetry of earth is ceasing never."

"A drainless shower Of light is poesy: 'tis the supreme of power; 'Tis might half slumbering on its own right arm."

"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right."

"The time for Pen and Sword was when "My ladye fayre," for pity, Could tend her wounded knight, and then Grow tender at his ditty. Some ladies now make pretty songs, And some make pretty nurses: Some men are good for righting wrongs, And some for writing verses."

"It ["The Ancient Mariner"] is marvellous in its mastery over that delightfully fortuitous inconsequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland."

"For, of all compositions, he thought that the sonnet Best repaid all the toil you expended upon it."

"Never did Poesy appear So full of heaven to me, as when I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men."

"These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, FitzGerald strung them on an English thread."

"Musæo contigens cuncta lepore."

"The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth—truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors."

"We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age."

"Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse, Such as the meeting soul may pierce, In notes, with many a winding bout Of linkèd sweetness long drawn out."

"Yea, marry, now it is somewhat, for now it is rhyme; before it was neither rhyme nor reason."

"An erit, qui velle recuset Os populi meruisse? et cedro digna locutus Linquere, nec scombros metuentia carmina nec thus."

"Verba togæ sequeris, junctura callidus acri, Ore teres modico, pallentes radere mores Doctus, et ingenuo culpam defigere ludo."

"The varying verse, the full resounding line, The long majestic march, and energy divine."

"Curst be the verse, how well soe'er it flow, That tends to make one worthy man my foe, Give virtue scandal, innocence a fear, Or from the soft-eyed virgin steal a tear!"

"I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science."

"A poem round and perfect as a star."

"I was promised on a time, To have reason for my rhyme; From that time unto this season, I received nor rhyme nor reason."

"Jewels five-words-long, That on the stretch'd forefinger of all Time Sparkle for ever."

"Tale tuum carmen nobis, divine poeta, Quale sopor fessis in gramine."

"One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose."

"Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good."

"And so no force, however great, Can strain a cord, however fine, Into a horizontal line That shall be absolutely straight."

"Give lettered pomp to teeth of Time, So "Bonnie Doon" but tarry: Blot out the epic's stately rhyme, But spare his Highland Mary!"

"The vision and the faculty divine; Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse."

"Wisdom married to immortal verse."

"To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius, a vital appropriating exercise of mind, closely allied to that which first created it."

"Like your body, your mind also gets tired, so refresh it by wise sayings."

"Books of quotations are an elemental model of how culture is perpetuated, the wisdom of the trite passed on to posterity, to be added to, edited, and modified by subsequent generations."

"Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author. Perhaps the next highest is, when a writer of any kind is so considerable that you go to the labor and pains of endeavoring to refute him before the public, the very doing of which is an incidental admission of his talent and power."

"The man whose book is filled with quotations, has been said to creep along the shore of authors, as if he were afraid to trust himself to the free compass of reasoning. I would rather defend such authors by a different allusion, and ask whether honey is the worse for being gathered from many flowers."

"In general, when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his quotations than from his comments."

"Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books: else distilled books are, like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not."

"There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. Cardinal du Perron has been heard to say that the happy application of a verse of Virgil has deserved a talent."

"It needs no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul."

"The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn't make any sense if quoted as it stands."

"Quotation, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated."

"One whom it is easier to hate, but still easier to quote—Alexander Pope."

"Its fall is entirely owing to itself, the seeds of death were in it from the commencement. The powers of satire and of derision, which it exercised with as little mercy as modesty, have proved, in the result, very humble powers; and after usurping an authority, the most dictatorial and audacious, a general doubt is now expressed as to the ability with which it was at one time supposed to have been conducted. Of this there certainly can be no dispute that it will be difficult to name as many volumes in the English language which afford so few quotable passages; and perhaps there can be no better proof of the original mediocrity of the contributors, whatever may have been the merit of a few occasional articles."

"Of all the many and (thanks to a free press) the ever-multiplying blessings attendant upon the "glorious constitution" of literature, not the least precious and profitable to a modern cultivator of systems and syllables, in pamphlets, magazines, and folios, is the right of Quotation."

"Shall we not rejoice then and revel in the glorious liberty of extract, and quote to the thousandth line? Shall we not have pages like the Pyramids?"

"I must stop to lament, that we cannot evince an admiring gratitude towards other excellent things by a like readiness of quotation: that we cannot, for instance, quote a star that we have been watching; or a hue of sunset; or a friend's voice, and his shake of the hand (I had almost said heart); or a beautiful picture..."

"Life itself is a quotation."

"At all events, the next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to quote another's wit."

"A great thought is a great boon, for which God is to be the first thanked, then he who is the first to utter it, and then, in a lesser, but still in a considerable degree, the man who is the first to quote it to us."

"Quotations can be valuable, like raisins in the rice pudding, for adding iron as well as eye appeal."

"Horace ou Despréaux l’a dit avant vous.—Je le crois sur votre parole; mais je l’ai dit comme mien. Ne puis-je pas penser après eux une chose vraie, et que d’autres encore penseront après moi?"

"At all times pseudoprofound aphorisms have been more popular than rigorous arguments."

"All which he understood by rote, And, as occasion serv'd, would quote."

"With just enough of learning to misquote."

"Perverts the Prophets, and purloins the Psalms."

"The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well."

"You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world."

"To copy beauties, forfeits all pretence To fame—to copy faults, is want of sense."

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more."

"There is nothing so ridiculous but some philosopher has said it."

"Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation."

"Exclusively of the abstract science, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism."

"Why are not more gems from our early prose writers scattered over the country by the periodicals?…But Great old books of the great old authors are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get more. Let every book-worm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it the widest circulation that newspapers and magazines, penny and halfpenny, can afford."

"Thou art a retailer of phrases, and dost deal in remnants of remnants."

"Quotation brings to many one of the intensest joys of living."

"To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason."

"Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy — on experience, the mistress of their Masters. They go about puffed up and pompous, dressed and decorated with [the fruits], not of their own labours, but of those of others. And they will not allow me my own. They will scorn me as an inventor; but how much more might they — who are not inventors but vaunters and declaimers of the works of others — be blamed."

"Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs."

"I love them because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognizedly wiser than oneself."

"One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotings."

"One may quote till one compiles."

"The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract."

"The greater part of our writers have become so original, that no one cares to imitate them: and those who never quote in return are seldom quoted."

"The wisdom of the wise and the experience of ages may be preserved by quotation."

"In quotation not only does language turn on itself, but it does so word by word and expression by expression, and this reflexive twist is inseparable from the convenience and universal applicability of the device. Here we already have enough to draw the interest of the philosopher of language."

"Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations."

"Abigail Adams: You do not need to quote great men to show you are one."

"A book which hath been culled from the flowers of all books."

"A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good."

"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation."

"Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know."

"Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west."

"Quotation confesses inferiority."

"Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better."

"We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates."

"When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple; take it and copy it. Give references? Why should you? Either your readers know where you have taken the passage and the precaution is needless, or they do not know and you humiliate them."

"Stronger than an army is a quotation whose time has come and which is true."

"People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations."

"But quotations and aphorisms are generally just verbal Christmas presents; enticingly done up in pretty paper and ribbons, but once you get them open they generally turn out to be just socks."

"Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language."

"Quotation, Sir, is a good thing; there is a community of mind in it : classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world."

"Just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. ... The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”"

"The Rules of Misquotation:"

": Axiom 1. Any quotation that can be altered will be."

":: Corollary 1A: Vivid words hook misquotes in the mind."

":: Corollary 1B: Numbers are hard to keep straight."

":: Corollary 1C: Small changes can have a big impact (or: what a difference an a makes)."

":: Corollary 1D: If noted figures don't say what needs to be said, we'll say it for them."

":: Corollary 1E: Journalists are a less than dependable source of accurate quotes."

":: Corollary 1F: Famous dead people make excellent commentators on current events."

": Axiom 2. Famous quotes need famous mouths."

":: Corollary 2A: Well-known messengers get credit for clever comments they report from less celebrated mouths."

":: Corollary 2B: Particularly quotable figures receive more than their share of quotable quotes."

":: Corollary 2C: Comments made about someone might as well have been said by that person."

":: Corollary 2D: Who you think said something may depend on where you live."

":: Corollary 2E: Vintage quotes are considered to be in the public domain."

":: Corollary 2F: In a pinch, any orphan quote can be called a Chinese proverb."

"Truth is not something in the distance; there is no path to it, there is neither your path nor my path; there is no devotional path, there is no path of knowledge or path of action, because truth has no path to it. The moment you have a path to truth, you divide it, because the path is exclusive; and what is exclusive at the very beginning will end in exclusiveness. The man who is following a path can never know truth because he is living in exclusiveness; his means are exclusive, and the means are the end, are not separate from the end. If the means are exclusive, the end is also exclusive. So there is no path to truth, and there are not two truths. Truth is not of the past or the present, it is timeless; the man who quotes the truth of the Buddha, of Shankara, of Christ, or who merely repeats what I am saying, will not find truth, because repetition is not truth. Repetition is a lie."

"I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly."

"C'est souvent hasarder un bon mot et vouloir le perdre quo de le donner pour sien."

"'Twas not an Age ago since most of our Books were nothing but Collections of Latin Quotations; there was not above a line or two of French in a Page."

"An apt quotation is like a lamp which flings its light over the whole sentence."

"He that has but ever so little examined the citations of writers, cannot doubt how little credit the quotations deserve when the originals are wanting ; and consequently how much less quotations of quotations can be relied on."

"Though old the thought and oft exprest, 'Tis his at last who says it best."

"The French public seem to estimate the master pieces of their favorite tragic poets chiefly by the number of fine quotable passages they supply; while their critics estimate their worth by their conformity with certain purely artificial rules."

"It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation."

"What lunkhead said, "there's no such thing as a free lunch"? According to the Columbia World of Quotations, no one is exactly sure."

"I got $25 from Reader's Digest last week for something I never said. I get credit all the time for things I never said."

"She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit…"

"Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams."

"Comme quelqu'un pourroit dire de moy, que j'ay seulement faict icy un amas de fleurs estrangieres, n'y ayant fourny du mien que le filet à les lier."

"Je ne dis les autres, sinon pour d'autant plus me dire."

"… I have seen books made of things neither studied nor ever understood … the author contenting himself for his own part, to have cast the plot and projected the design of it, and by his industry to have bound up the fagot of unknown provisions; at least the ink and paper his own. This may be said to be a buying or borrowing, and not a making or compiling of a book."

"Quando mi viene in mente un bell'aforisma, lo metto in conto a Montesquieu, od a La Rochefoucauld. Non si sono mai lamentati."

"I've always felt that if a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say it better? … If you are charmed by an author, I think it's a very strange and invalid imagination that doesn't long to share it. Somebody else should read it."

"We are what we have deitalicized."

"The undigested is quoted, the assimilated is not."

"All those who listen to me shall pass on my words to others and those to others again; and may the last ones understand my words better than those who listen to me directly."

"I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if i can remember any of the damn things."

"Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely-read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely."

"When you see yourself quoted in print and you're sorry you said it, it suddenly becomes a misquotation."

"The poem, although widely differing in subject from any of Mrs. Lewis' prior compositions, and far superior to any of them in general vigor, artistic skill, and assured certainty of purpose, is nevertheless easily recognizable as the production of the same mind which originated "Florence" and "The Forsaken." We perceive, throughout, the same passion, the same enthusiasm, and the same seemingly reckless abandon of thought and manner which we have already mentioned as characterizing the writer. We should have spoken also, of a fastidious yet most sensitive and almost voluptuous sense of Beauty. These are the general traits of "The Child of the Sea:" but undoubtedly the chief value of the poem, to ordinary readers, will be found to lie in the aggregation of its imaginative passages—its quotable points."

"Stop quoting laws, we carry weapons!"

"The next best thing to being clever is being able to quote someone who is."

"Nor suffers Horace more in wrong translations By wits, than critics in as wrong quotations."

"He ranged his tropes, and preached up patience, Backed his opinion with quotations."

"Quotes are just fancy ways of stating the obvious"

"Those quotations were really quite obscure. Anyone can see that he is a very well-read man."

"My toils in the quotation field have led me to formulate two or three laws about the way people use and abuse quotations. My first law is: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to Bernard Shaw – which I don't mean to be taken literally, but as a general observation of the habit people have of attaching remarks to the nearest obvious speaker."

"An analogous process I shall call Churchillian Drift ... Whereas quotations with an apothegmatic feel are normally ascribed to Shaw, those with a more grandiose or belligerent tone are, as if by osmosis, credited to Churchill. All humorous remarks obviously made by a female originated, of course, with Dorothy Parker. All quotations in translation, on the other hand, should be attributed to Goethe (with "I think" obligatory)."

"It seems simple: a quotation is a repetition of a saying : But leading language philosophers — Frege, Tarski, Geach, Quine, Searle — recognized that quotations are trouble. Donald Davidson was taught that quotation is “a somewhat shady device” and an “invitation to sin.”"

"Always to verify your references."

"A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool."

"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it."

"I always have a quotation for everything—it saves original thinking."

"A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought."

"The little honesty existing among authors is to be seen in the outrageous way in which they misquote from the writings of others."

"I shall never be ashamed to quote a bad author if what he says is good."

"The best ideas are common property."

"Whatever is well said by anyone is mine."

"I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot — we inhale from our Bartlett's."

"They had been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps."

"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."

"Fine phrases I value more than bank-notes. I have ear for no other harmony than the harmony of words. To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for."

"It's better to be quotable than to be honest."

"Whoever only reads in order to transcribe wise and shining Remarks, without entering into the Genius and Spirit of the Author, as it is probable that he will make no very judicious Extract, so he will be apt to trust to that Collection in all his Compositions, and be misled out of the regular Way of thinking, in order to introduce those Materials which he has been at the Pains to gather: And the Product of all this will be found a manifest and incoherent Piece of Patchwork."

"A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation."

"It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view—and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite."

"I like quoting Einstein. Know why? Because nobody dares contradict you."

"A witty saying proves nothing."

"Some great writers produce a profound effect by their work as a whole, but are not readily quotable; others have the gift of condensing their meaning into a striking phrase. The conscious and deliberate literary artist will generally be found to belong to the latter class. Pope, for example, is the most quotable writer in English after Shakespeare. Stevenson stands intermediate. On the whole, he rather diffuses his meaning, and makes it an atmosphere enfolding everything; but at times his skill in words concentrates itself in a sentence or phrase, or even in a word."

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

"I am but a gatherer and disposer of other men's stuff."

"To patchwork learn'd quotations are allied, Both strive to make our poverty our pride."

"Some, for renown, on scraps of learning dote, And think they grow immortal as they quote."

"Stories help explain themselves; if you know how something happened, you begin to see why it happened."

"Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it."

"All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut."

"..Eyewitness history, flawed as it may be, is frequently more useful and accurate than attempts to reconstruct history through secondary sources once all those who witnessed the events are long dead..."

"Don't let them tell us stories. Don't let them say of the man sentenced to death "He is going to pay his debt to society," but: "They are going to cut off his head." It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference. And then there are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye."

"Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years."

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

"Storyless spaces, like black holes, suck ferociously on whatever comes into their orbit in their need to be occupied."

"In telling a story, in depicting it, one makes it exist in its particularity with its beginning and its end, its glory or its shame; and this is the way it actually must be lived."

"Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded. If all you want is plot, go and read a Tom Clancy novel."

"Any story worth telling relates to real life in some meaningful way. Scifi allows you to tell meaningful stories without seeming too preachy — it adds a metaphorical layer between the story and the real world. Scifi is dismissed as ungrounded fluff, but it's actually the opposite."

"Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images."

"The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising ("but of course that's why he was doing that, and that means that...") and it's magic and wonderful and strange."

"Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk.Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass.Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by: War's annals will cloud into night Ere their story die."

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."

"When I was writing Dune there was no room in my mind for concerns about the book's success or failure. I was concerned only with the writing. Six years of research had preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving of the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had never before experienced. It was to be a story exploring the myth of the Messiah. It was to produce another view of a human-occupied planet as an energy machine. It was to penetrate the interlocked workings of politics and economics. It was to be an examination of absolute prediction and its pitfalls. It was to have an awareness drug in it and tell what could happen through dependence on such a substance. Potable water was to be an analog for oil and for water itself, a substance whose supply diminishes each day. It was to be an ecological novel, then, with many overtones, as well as a story about people and their human concerns with human values, and I had to monitor each of these levels at every stage in the book. There wasn't room in my head to think about much else."

"We have stories as old as the great seas breaking through the chest, flying out the mouth, noisy tongues that once were silenced, all the oceans we contain coming to light"

"They think these are only stories not what holds the world together in its balance."

"To the extent that we can imagine ourselves in the story, we can embody and explore its values and lessons."

"I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories."

"My stories are history of a kind. The difference is that I write of the nameless ones, and when they have left no stories I write what must have been, what could have been, using knowledge of the country itself, how it was traveled, how many people lived by hunting and gathering, and what their relationships might have been with the Indians and others. Yet my stories or any others, as well as history itself, must always be read with the understanding that we know only a small part of the whole picture."

"The stock market was created by the telegraph and the telephone, and its panics are engineered by carefully orchestrated stories in the press."

"Silly me; silly old Doctor. When you wake up, you'll have a mum and dad, and you won't even remember me. Well, you'll remember me a little... I'll be a story in your head. But that's OK. We're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? Cause it was, you know. It was the best. A daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away."

"Don't be alone, Doctor. And do one more thing for me. There's a little girl waiting in a garden. She's going to wait a long while, so she's going to need a lot of hope. Go to her. Tell her a story. Tell her that if she's patient, the days are coming that she'll never forget. Tell her she'll go to sea and fight pirates. She'll fall in love with a man who'll wait two-thousand years to keep her safe. Tell her she'll give hope to the greatest painter who ever lived and save a whale in outer space. Tell her this is the story of Amelia Pond. And this is how it ends."

"All Nature's wildness tells the same story: the shocks and outbursts of earthquakes, volcanoes, geysers, roaring, thundering waves and floods, the silent uprush of sap in plants, storms of every sort, each and all, are the orderly, beauty-making love-beats of Nature's heart."

"I'm trying to avoid that thing where you get a story in your head that's very clean. I think there are too many people that come up with a very simple story where they're the hero, and they don't learn anything."

"Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories. And they will figure out how those stories apply to them."

"Narrating incredible things as though they were real—old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible—the new."

"Attend me briefly while I now disclose How art of fable telling first arose. Unhappy slaves, in servitude confined, Dared not to harsh masters show their mind, But under veiling of fable’s dress Contrived their thoughts and feelings to express, Escaping still their lords’ affronted wrath. So Aesop did; I widen out his path."

"For, beyond all doubt, there is a certain kind of legitimate faking in story construction. Aristotle was hot on its trail when he declared that the dramatist must not use, in his plots, events which are improbable, even though they are possible; and he should always select events which are probable, even though impossible. In other words, what decides the whole business is the attitude of the audience and its actual response to what is presented to them. The impression which a story makes upon a person is always relative to his knowledge, his range of experience, his emotional habits, and his social prejudices and customs. Few of us have a very wide or deep hold upon the truth, as the scientist understands truth. Hence, mere fact does not weigh heavily in our likes and dislikes of stories. If it did, historians and biologists would rank as high in literature as Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens."

"Navita de ventis, de tauris narrat arator, Enumerat miles vulnera, pastor oves."

"One of the ghosts — an old woman — beckoned, urging her to come close. Then she spoke, and Mary heard her say: "Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories." That was all, and then she was gone. It was one of those moments when we suddenly recall a dream that we’ve unaccountably forgotten, and back in a flood comes all the emotion we felt in our sleep. It was the dream she’d tried to describe to Atal, the night picture; but as Mary tried to find it again, it dissolved and drifted apart, just as these presences did in the open air. The dream was gone. All that was left was the sweetness of that feeling, and the injunction to tell them stories."

"A sense of belonging, a sense of being part of a real and important story, a sense of being connected to other people, to people who are not here any more, to those who have gone before us. And a sense of being connected to the universe itself. All those things were promised and summed up in the phrase, 'The Kingdom of Heaven'. But if the Kingdom is dead, we still need those things. We can't live without those things because it's too bleak, it's too bare and we don't need to. We can find a way of creating them for ourselves if we think in terms of a Republic of Heaven. This is not a Kingdom but a Republic, in which we are all free and equal citizens, with — and this is the important thing — responsibilities. With the responsibility to make this place into a Republic of Heaven for everyone. Not to live in it in a state of perpetual self-indulgence, but to work hard to make this place as good as we possibly can."

"All these tattered old bits and pieces have a history and a meaning. A group of them together can seem like the traces left by an ionizing particle in a bubble chamber: they draw the line of a path taken by something too mysterious to see. That path is a story, of course. What scientists do when they look at the line of bubbles on the screen is work out the story of the particle that made them: what sort of particle it must have been, and what caused it to move in that way, and how long it was likely to continue. Dr. Mary Malone would have been familiar with that sort of story in the course of her search for dark matter. But it might not have occurred to her, for example, when she sent a postcard to an old friend shortly after arriving in Oxford for the first time, that that card itself would trace part of a story that hadn't yet happened when she wrote it. Perhaps some particles move backward in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don't understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are. There are many things we haven't yet learned how to read. The story in this book is partly about that very process."

"That’s why stories appeal to us. They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack."

"The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

"No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old — it is the new combinations that make them new."

"Les hommes ne veulent connaître que l'histoire des grands et des rois, qui ne sert à personne."

"I got twenty different kids telling me twenty different stories."

"I'll to thy closet; and go read with thee Sad stories, chanced in the times of old."

"Their copious stories, oftentimes begun, End without audience, and are never done."

"For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground, And tell sad stories of the death of kings."

"Greedy men say "More!" to war Sitting together telling stories could change that but who will take the time?"

"Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories."

"The story circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess. A gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits. Its departures and arrivals. Its quietness."

"A story is not just a story. Once the forces have been aroused and set into motion, they can’t simply be stopped at someone’s request. Once told, the story is bound to circulate; humanized, it may have a temporary end, but its effects linger on and its end is never truly an end."

"Whenever I direct a film, I always keep this in mind, never put too much explanation in the story, if I put in too much details in the story, there won’t be much room for the viewers’ imagination. And a good story must have good balance, if the story is too complicated, the viewers would have difficulty following the story. That is why I am always taking care of the balance."

"Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell our story to someone who listens, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances."

"We define a citation as an action, that is, a citation is the inclusion of a reference, by a paper, in its reference list."

"Neither citation nor loan demand is an adequate measure of literature use by a large community. Each is only an indicator, illuminating some aspects of use but with its own inherent bias. The joint study of several indicators gives a more balanced picture."

"Citation does not necessarily reflect current demand."

"..Eyewitness history, flawed as it may be, is frequently more useful and accurate than attempts to reconstruct history through secondary sources once all those who witnessed the events are long dead..."

"Citation index has provided researchers new ways to grasp the development of science and to cast a glimpse of the big picture of science."

"Men who are never flagrantly dishonest are at times unveracious in small matters, colouring or suppressing facts with a conscious purpose; and writers who never stole an idea nor pretended to honours for which they had not striven, may be found lapsing into small insincerities, speaking a language which is not theirs, uttering opinions which they expect to gain applause rather than the opinions really believed by them. But if few men are perfectly and persistently sincere, Sincerity is nevertheless the only enduring strength. The principle is universal, stretching from the highest purposes of Literature down to its smallest details. It underlies the labour of the philosopher, the investigator, the moralist, the poet, the novelist, the critic, the historian, and the compiler. It is visible in the publication of opinions, in the structure of sentences, and in the fidelity of citations."

"We shall now proceed to lay before the reader some selections from the work under consideration, as illustrative of the style and matter..."

"Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?"

"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."

"The question of what constitutes a "citation" is one of the most controverted issues in the modern study of ancient quotations."

"The reference is completely defined by the citing text it belongs to and the cited text to which it points. In semiotic terms the reference is a sign — the elementary unit of a representational system with the cited text as its referent... The citation is the mirror image of the reference... By organizing the references not according to the texts they belong to, but according to the texts they point at — they become attributes of the cited instead of the original, citing text. Semiotically, the citing text is the referent of the citation."

"Since the citation and the reference have different referents and are actually each other's mirror image, it does not seem very wise to blur the distinction between them. This distinction has moreover the advantage that the quest for a citation theory in scientometrics and the sociology of science splits into two different, analytically independent research problems: the patterns in the citing behaviour of scientists, social scientists and scholars in the humanities on the one hand, and the theoretical foundation of citation analysis on the other."

"The citation as used in scientometric analysis and science and technology indicators is not identical to the reference produced at the scientist's desk. In other words, the citation is the product of the citation indexer, not of the scientist."

"The more rigorously criticism historicizes a work of art, in the sense of lodging it in the context of the moment of its production, the less likely it becomes for criticism to be able to explain either its own subsequent interest in the work or the possibility of lay—that is, nonacademic—interest in reading it."

"Fame is a form—perhaps the worst form—of incomprehension."

"Thinking, meditating, imagining are not anomalous acts – they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional exercise of that function, to treasure beyond price ancient and foreign thoughts, to recall with incredulous awe what some doctor universalis thought, is to confess our own languor, or our own barbarie. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he shall be."

"I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge; I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there."

"People who read only the classics are sure to remain up-to-date."

"The way to become a classic is by not resembling the classics in any way."

"It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance."

"The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth."

"At home these men’s works [Kant, Schiller and Goethe] were kept in the bookcase with the green glass panes in Papa’s study, and Törless knew this bookcase was never opened except to display its contents to a visitor. It was like the shrine of some divinity to which one does not readily draw nigh and which one venerates only because one is glad that thanks to its existence there are certain things one need no longer bother about."

"In order to be able thus to misjudge, and thus to grant left-handed veneration to our classics, people must have ceased to know them. This, generally speaking, is precisely what has happened. For, otherwise, one ought to know that there is only one way of honoring them, and that is to continue seeking with the same spirit and with the same courage, and not to weary of the search. But to foist the doubtful title of “classics” upon them, and to “edify” oneself from time to time by reading their works, means to yield to those feeble and selfish emotions which all the paying public may purchase at concert-halls and theatres. Even the raising of monuments to their memory, and the christening of feasts and societies with their names—all these things are but so many ringing cash payments by means of which the Culture-Philistine discharges his indebtedness to them, so that in all other respects he may be rid of them, and, above all, not bound to follow in their wake and prosecute his search further. For henceforth inquiry is to cease: that is the Philistine watchword."

"I do not know what meaning classical studies could have for our time if they were not untimely—that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come."

"To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology."

"These discoveries in old books of new beauties and aspects of interest may persuade us, therefore, that we are not only still ourselves, but more ourselves than ever: that our spirit has not only persisted in its being, but has become more lucid in the process."

"I will venture to give one word by way of advice, and to express a hope that the study of the ancient classics will not be abandoned when they are no longer compulsory. Believe me, that to the man who wishes to study politics, or the art of persuasion, nothing can be more necessary than to imbue his mind with the spirit of the ancient poets and historians, that he may be able to infuse into his own arguments and compositions, and to draw from that pure and crystal fountain, some of the copious diction, high sentiment, and masculine thought, which so eminently distinguished those great men, but whom there is no hope of successfully rivalling."

"Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them."

"“Our ideas” are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people, of our teachers (in the broadest sense of the term) and of our teachers’ teachers; they are abbreviations and residues of the thought of the past. These thoughts were once explicit and in the center of consideration and discussion. It may even be presumed that they were once perfectly lucid. By being transmitted to later generations they have possibly been transformed, and there is no certainty that the transformation was effected consciously and with full clarity."

"Those who raise the objection of the distance in time, will certainly recall many golden words of long-dead sages and poets which strike such a deep and kindred chord in our own hearts that we very vividly feel a living and intimate contact with those great ones who have left this world long ago. Such experience contrasts with the ‘very much present’ silly chatter of society, newspapers or radio, which, when compared with those ancient voices of wisdom and beauty, will appear to emanate from the mental level of stone-age man tricked out in modern trappings. True wisdom is always young, and always near to the grasp of an open mind."

"Something that everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read."

"The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms."

"The nature of fairy tales is to evolve over time and to portray eternal themes that resonate with people of all cultures and time periods."

"I have a dream, a song to sing, To help me cope with anything. If you see the wonder of a fairy tale You can take the future even if you fail. I believe in angels, something good in everything I see. I believe in angels, when I know the time is right for me, I'll cross the stream, I have a dream."

"Broadly speaking, and in most cases, the fairy tale is a dramatic projection in symbolic images of the life of the psyche, and it can travel from one country to another, one culture to another culture, whenever what it has to say holds good for human nature in both, despite their differences. […] a genuine myth, like the Chaplin clown, can always be recognized by the fact that its appeal cuts across all differences between highbrow and lowbrow tastes."

"Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me. Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the , the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams — day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing — are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization. A prominent educator tells me that fairy tales are of untold value in developing imagination in the young. I believe it."

"The enduring appeal of fairy tales is not just due to their fantastical elements—dragons, enchanted sleeping princesses, fairy godmothers—or the wish-fulfillment of happily-ever-after, but their encapsulation of truths about man and morality. Indeed, beneath the fluff, fairy tales are often brutally realistic about the world. This is why so many modern efforts to write (or rewrite) fairy tales fall flat: they are being written by those with a poor grasp of reality."

"Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear."

"The dogmas we really hold are far more fantastic, and, perhaps, far more beautiful than we think. In the course of these essays I fear that I have spoken from time to time of rationalists and rationalism, and that in a disparaging sense. Being full of that kindliness which should come at the end of everything, even of a book, I apologize to the rationalists even for calling them rationalists. There are no rationalists. We all believe fairy-tales, and live in them. Some, with a sumptuous literary turn, believe in the existence of the lady clothed with the sun. Some, with a more rustic, elvish instinct, like Mr. McCabe, believe merely in the impossible sun itself. Some hold the undemonstrable dogma of the existence of God; some the equally undemonstrable dogma of the existence of the man next door."

"Even the tyrant never rules by force alone; but mostly by fairy tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant, the great employer."

"I have a duty to my people and that is something you can never understand. I loved living in Louisiana and I wish my life could be like this everyday. But this is not reality. You think my life as a princess is some fairytale? This here is a fairytale and I cannot hide here anymore. Soon I'll be queen of Costa Luna. My country needs me."

"Doctor Who has never pretended to be hard science fiction … At best Doctor Who is a fairytale, with fairytale logic about this wonderful man in this big blue box who at the beginning of every story lands somewhere where there is a problem."

"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

"I would not for any quantity of gold part with the wonderful tales which I have retained from my earliest childhood, or have met with in my progress through life."

"Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine: that is a fairytale ; then read this and that as well, and you will see what is a fairytale. Were I further begged to describe the fairytale, or define what it is, I would make answer, that I should as soon think of describing the abstract human face, or stating what must go to constitute a human being. A fairytale is just a fairytale, as a face is just a face; and of all fairytales I know, I think Undine the most beautiful."

""Suppose my child ask me what the fairytale means, what am I to say?" If you do not know what it means, what is easier than to say so? If you do see a meaning in it, there it is for you to give him. A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much."

"A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory. He must be an artist indeed who can, in any mode, produce a strict allegory that is not a weariness to the spirit."

"A fairytale, like a butterfly or a bee, helps itself on all sides, sips at every wholesome flower, and spoils not one. The true fairytale is, to my mind, very like the sonata. We all know that a sonata means something; and where there is the faculty of talking with suitable vagueness, and choosing metaphor sufficiently loose, mind may approach mind, in the interpretation of a sonata, with the result of a more or less contenting consciousness of sympathy."

"The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is — not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself. The best Nature does for us is to work in us such moods in which thoughts of high import arise. Does any aspect of Nature wake but one thought? Does she ever suggest only one definite thing? Does she make any two men in the same place at the same moment think the same thing? Is she therefore a failure, because she is not definite? Is it nothing that she rouses the something deeper than the understanding — the power that underlies thoughts? Does she not set feeling, and so thinking at work? Would it be better that she did this after one fashion and not after many fashions? Nature is mood-engendering, thought-provoking: such ought the sonata, such ought the fairytale to be."

"I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him."

"Entertainment written for children was no less grisly. In 1815 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published a compendium of old folktales that had gradually been adapted for children. Commonly known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the collection ranks with the Bible and Shakespeare as one of the bestselling and most respected works in the Western canon. Though it isn’t obvious from the bowdlerized versions in Walt Disney films, the tales are filled with murder, infanticide, cannibalism, mutilation, and sexual abuse—grim fairy tales indeed. Take just the three famous stepmother stories: During a famine, the father and stepmother of Hansel and Gretel abandon them in a forest so that they will starve to death. The children stumble upon an edible house inhabited by a witch, who imprisons Hansel and fattens him up in preparation for eating him. Fortunately Gretel shoves the witch into a fiery oven, and “the godless witch burned to death in a horrible way.” Cinderella’s stepsisters, when trying to squeeze into her slippers, take their mother’s advice and cut off a toe or heel to make them fit. Doves notice the blood, and after Cinderella marries the prince, they peck out the stepsisters’ eyes, punishing them “for their wickedness and malice with blindness for the rest of their lives.” Snow White arouses the jealousy of her stepmother, the queen, so the queen orders a hunter to take her into the forest, kill her, and bring back her lungs and liver for the queen to eat. When the queen realizes that Snow White has escaped, she makes three more attempts on her life, two by poison, one by asphyxiation. After the prince has revived her, the queen crashes their wedding, but “iron slippers had already been heated up for her over a fire of coals.... She had to put on the red-hot iron shoes and dance in them until she dropped to the ground dead.” As we shall see, purveyors of entertainment for young children today have become so intolerant of violence that even episodes of the early Muppets have been deemed too dangerous for them."

"I'm in love with a fairytale, even though it hurts. 'Cause I don't care if I lose my mind; I'm already cursed."

"Like so many other fairy tales, I thought it was a horror story."

"Believable fairy-stories must be intensely practical. You must have a map, no matter how rough. Otherwise you wander all over the place. In The Lord of the Rings I never made anyone go farther than he could on a given day. The reader must approach Faerie with a willing suspension of disbelief. If a thing can be technologically controlled, it ceases to be magical."

"Fairy tales and more fairy tales."

"Most historical novels suffer from the fatal twin defects of emphasizing the pastness of the past too much while at the same time seeking to be over-familiar with it (“Have some more of this Chian,” drawled Alcibiades)."

"I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.”"

"What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny...the time of reading, the time defined by the author's language resonating in the self, is not the world's time, but the soul's. The energies that otherwise tend to stream outward through a thousand channels of distraction are marshaled by the cadences of the prose; they are brought into focus by the fact that it is an ulterior, and entirely new, world that the reader has entered. The free-floating self--the self we diffusely commune with while driving or walking or puttering in the kitchen--is enlisted in the work of bringing the narrative to life. In the process, we are able to shake off the habitual burden of insufficient meaning and flex our deeper natures.”"

"If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents.”"

"To read, when one does so of one's own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and to set off toward it"

"All novels are sequels; influence is bliss."

"In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns."

"People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are."

"A good novel tells us about the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author...A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular man, an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind"

"A good novel tells us about its hero. A bad novel tells us about the author."

"The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time."

"It was only after two years' work [he confesses] that it occurred to me I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is — an intense form of thought."

"When I want to read a novel, I write one."

"Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do."

"Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world."

"Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life gets stuck to the roof of your mouth"

"Axiom: Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise."

"But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters."

"As for 'story' I never yet did enjoy a novel or play in which someone didn't tell me afterward that there was something wrong with the story, so that's going to be no drawback as far as I'm concerned. "Good Lord, why am I so bored"—"I know; it must be the plot developing harmoniously." So I often reply to myself, and there rises before me my special nightmare—that of the writer as craftsman, natty and deft."

"I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.”"

"You can't write a novel without sentences."

"Novels aren't about heroes. They're about us."

"For novelists, there is one big idea, always present and always demanding of attention. It goes something like this: what does it mean to be human? How can we conduct our lives to best effect? For many readers, the novel is as close as we ever come to philosophy. And it may be quite close enough. Ideas, big and little, should never be discounted in the novel because "it's only fiction." It's fiction, all right, but not only."

"The novel is dead. As dead as alchemy."

"He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed."

"Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be."

"Since 1900 there must have been published far more than twenty thousand novels. No man could read them all; if he did, a new spate of fiction would foam and swirl round him while he was at the task, and he would never catch up. Selection, voluntary and involuntary, there is bound to be. And it is bound to involve injustice."

"A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions."

"Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.”"

"Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."

"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead...In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than ask so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties"

"The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble."

"Jane: What do you think of his book Arthur? Gideon: I don't think of it. I've had no reason to, particularly. I've not had to review it. ...I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form—slices of life served up cold in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. I can hardly feel the difference, though I can see it, between a good novel and a bad one. I couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish everyone would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think..."

"Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us."

"The novel belongs to the category of natural poetry - the allegory to that of the artificial."

"Sir, ’said Stephen,‘ I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them--I look upon good novels--as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater breadth and depth and fewer constraints.”"

"[on an unnamed book] This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

"No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons."

"Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels."

"The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? Were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? Did you mistake eleven for ten? Were you too late to dress? And did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing."

"Someone ought to write a novel about me, ”said Lebedeva loftily.“ I shouldn’t care if they lied to make it more interesting, as long as they were good lies, full of kisses and daring escapes and the occasional act of barbarism. I can’t abide a poor liar."

"In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust"

"What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry."

"It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo."

"...in a volume of dozen lines of Milton, Proper and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator and a chapter from the Sterne are eulogized by a thousand pens-there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and slighting the performance which have only genius, wit and taste to recommend them."

"I am no novel reader – I seldom look into novels - Do not imagine that I often read novels - It is only very well for a novel."

"And what are you reading miss...? It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."

"A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”"

"...A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job…But a story can be a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend."

"Punning on the typographical and literary meaning of the word “character” and exploiting the resemblance of the “word” with “world”, Moore has identified the purpose of transpositions like this which continue throughout the novel: I was inspired by the idea of anagram, which is the rearrangement of characters to make new worlds."

"I believed the novel to be a messy expression of that mysterious banality ‘the creative process’- not unlike life, I suppose."

"BLANK-VERSE, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters -- the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind."

"Blank verse really deserving the name I believe...to be impossible except to one or two eminent writers in a generation."

"I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original."

"He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse: but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme."

"Blank verse seems to be verse only to the eye."

"Rhyme is no necessary adjunct of true poetry."

"As it is generally seen, blank verse seems to be only a laborious and doubtful struggle to escape from the fangs of prose. [I]f it ever ventures to relax into simple and natural phraseology, it instantly becomes tame and the prey of its pursuer."

"If some gentlemen are resolved that blank verse shall be prose, they have my free leave to enjoy their saying, provided I may have theirs to think they mean nothing by it, unless they can prove that rhyme is essential to metre; consequently that the Goths and monks were the first inventers of verse, and that Homer and Virgil, as well as Milton, wrote nothing but prose."

"Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes"

"When the cat's away, the mice will play."

"The purpose of creation, is lila. The concept of lila escapes all the traditional difficulties in assigning purpose to the creator. Lila is a purpose-less purpose, a natural outflow, a spontaneous self-manifestation of the Divine. The concept of lila, again, emphasizes the role of delight in creation. The concept of Prakriti and Maya fail to explain the bliss aspect of Divine. If the world is manifestation of the Force of Satcitananda, the deployment of its existence and consciousness, its purpose can be nothing but delight. This is the meaning of delight. Lila, the play, the child’s joy, the poet’s joy, the actor’s joy, the mechanician’s joy of the soul of things eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible, creating and recreating Himself in Himself for the sheer bliss of that self-creation, of that self-representation, Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground"

"Take a look at those clowns And the tricks that they play In the circus of life Life is bitter and gay"

"If you have a rifle, hanging on the wall in the first act, it should fire in the last"

"Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought."

"It is a happy talent to know how to play."

"Play it, Sam. Play As Time Goes By."

"Intellectual life has a certain spontaneous character and inner determination. It has also a peculiar poise of its own, which I believe is established by a balance between two basic qualities in the intellectual’s attitude toward ideas—qualities that may be designated as playfulness and piety."

"ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY."

"Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God."

"But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it."

"Wonder Woman: Poor child! You've lived a terrible life- gloomy. Tragic. You're fun starved! You must learn to play!"

"Machines do not have feelings... This is not to say that no inanimate objects have feelings -- toys are loaded with feelings, for instance, and only a monster would break the heart of a rag doll."

"Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play Now I need a place to hide away. Oh, I believe in yesterday."

"By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings."

"The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost."

"A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance — you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke."

"In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time."

"Look around you. Everywhere. They are there. In every home - lurking in dark corners … small, bi-pedal entities with almost human brains play their games in which adults are the pawns. They play and wait for the time when they will take over the world!"

"Lila, as a concept denoting play, is applied to much of Indian thought, both spiritual and secular."

"Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!"

"Be a clown, be a clown, All the world loves a clown. Act the fool, play the calf, And you'll always have the last laugh."

"I like desires like children and their plays that tease me now and then into knowing life."

"Lila (pronounced Leela) is the play of creation. To awakened consciousness, the entire universe. With all its joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, appears as a divine game, sport, or drama. It is a play in which the one Consciousness performs all the roles. Alluding to this lila of the Divine Mother the physical universe is a “mansion of mirth.”"

"حَدَّثَنَا مُحَمَّدٌ، أَخْبَرَنَا أَبُو مُعَاوِيَةَ، حَدَّثَنَا هِشَامٌ، عَنْ أَبِيهِ، عَنْ عَائِشَةَ ـ رضى الله عنها ـ قَالَتْ كُنْتُ أَلْعَبُ بِالْبَنَاتِ عِنْدَ النَّبِيِّ صلى الله عليه وسلم وَكَانَ لِي صَوَاحِبُ يَلْعَبْنَ مَعِي، فَكَانَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم إِذَا دَخَلَ يَتَقَمَّعْنَ مِنْهُ، فَيُسَرِّبُهُنَّ إِلَىَّ فَيَلْعَبْنَ مَعِي‏.‏"

"The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power."

"Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays."

"Deute den lieblichen Schein und mache Ernst aus dem Spiel, so wirst du das Centrum fassen und die verehrte Kunst in höherm Lichte wieder finden."

"If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am."

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts."

"The play's the thing, Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

"Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear, Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear. So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows. The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand, And, touching hers, make blessèd my rude hand. Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night."

"Kirk: The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play."

"Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and...Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."

"It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance — lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt” p\"

"Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part."

"I think women are really good at making friends and not good at networking. Men are good at networking and not necessarily making friends. That's a gross generalization, but I think it holds in many ways."

"All generalizations are false, including this one."

"An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular."

"As the generalization goes about the art industry, people can be really challenging and thought-provoking in their thinking and questioning the status quo, and it's really important that the status quo can be questioned and that there are people doing that."

"All generalizations are dangerous, even this one."

"In generalizing lies the difficulty of scientific map-making, for it no longer allows the cartographer to rely merely on objective facts but requires him to interpret them subjectively. To be sure the selection of the subject matter is controlled by considerations regarding its suitability and value, but the manner in which this material is to be rendered graphically depends on personal and subjective feeling. But the latter must not predominate: the dictates of science will prevent any erratic flight of the imagination and impart to the map a fundamentally objective character in spite of all subjective impulses. It is in this respect that maps are distinguished from fine products of art. Generalized maps and, in fact, all abstract maps should, therefore, be products of art clarified by science."

"Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it's intimate and psychological / resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul."

"Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as "glittering generalities," have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever."

"A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange arrays of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation."

"Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past."

"The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing. In science, however, a generalization means a principle that has been found to hold true in every special case. … The principle of leverage is a scientific generalization."

"The highest of generalizations is the synergetic integration of truth and love."

"People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations."

"A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'."

"All sweeping assertions are erroneous."

"Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations."

"The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour."

"Law is the continuous manifestation of God's presence — not reason for believing him absent. Great confusion arises from our using the same word law in two totally distinct senses … as the cause and the effect. It is said that to "explain away" everything by law is to enable us to do without God. But law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table. Law brings us continually back to God instead of carrying us away from him."

"An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet."

"For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience."

"Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life."

"We generalize from one situation to another not because we cannot tell the difference between the two situations but because we judge that they are likely to belong to a set of situations having the same consequence."

"Have you ever read a Michael Crichton novel, or seen one of his movies, in which the hubristic scientist actually paused and declared: "Hey, science shouldn't be done in shadows. If I keep this new thing secret I'll probably do something gruesomely stupid. But if I discuss this innovation with hundreds of peers, some of them will catch my mistakes and things won't get out of hand. Nobody will die."

"Dear Sir, We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the in any case erroneous comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere. Respectfully,"

"The nature of the peer-review process is creating a knowledge production cartel that gives the Western academy neocolonialist control over the means of production of knowledge. Any critique from outside the elite cartel is sidelined (especially if it is seen as a serious enough threat) by invoking the ‘peer-review’ as a silver bullet. One of the most cherished myths of the Western-controlled liberal arts intellectual apparatus is that its peer-review is a fair system. The criticisms we make of their scholarship are considered illegitimate because their writings have been peer-reviewed. … all our rejoinders get classified as ‘attacks’ on them, and not as fair criticism, because these do not emanate from within the peer- review cabal. … those who are not licensed by their academic union should not be allowed to argue against their positions, and certainly not as equal partners. This attitude is, … part of a larger problem in academic discourse, especially in anthropology, sociology and the study of religion, where it is assumed that (i) the non-academician can only be positioned as a native informant, and (ii) the native informant should not talk back. This allows mediocre scholars to close ranks and emphasize the schism between ‘we the scholars’ and ‘you the ignorant consumers’.Clearly, the peer-review process has acquired tremendous symbolic value. This blind spot in the academy prevents it from much-needed self-reflection."

"... we all know the problems of the peer review system, and nothing better has been found."

"An authority isn't a person or institution who is always right – ain't no such animal. An authority is a person or institution who has a process for lowering the likelihood that they are wrong to acceptably low levels. [...] And this is what I think is really worth celebrating as Wikipedia begins its second decade. It took one of the best ideas of the last 500 years – peer review – and expanded its field of operation so dramatically that it changed the way authority is configured."

"Any writing, of course, requires some interpretation as part of our efforts to evaluate, refine, extend, or appreciate its achievement or to provide special background that readers outside the author’s culture or historical period may require. But certain authors – in literature, the twentieth-century modernists are among the best examples – present themselves as so immediately and intrinsically “difficult” as to require special interpretative efforts even for those well equipped to understand them."

"Literary critics like Lionel Trilling ... demand that our novels illuminate the manners and morals of prevailing society. Professor Trilling is right, because otherwise what use are they for us? But he is wrong-headed, because he does not see that the burden of proof is not on the artist but on our society. If such convenient criticism of prevalent life does not get to be written, it is likely that the prevailing society is not inspiring enough; its humanity is not great enough, it does not have enough future, to be worth the novelist’s trouble."

"The intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois “humanism,” the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responses to all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today’s literary theorist as Saussure, Lukács, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity. ..."

"In any other job in the world, if you wasted all your time fucking around and didn’t get any work done, you’d get fired. Writer’s Block is a filthy lie. I couldn’t have Accountant’s Block. Oh, woe is me, I can’t make these spreadsheets because I’m just not feeling it today—FIRED."

"I’ve realized over the years that, with rare exceptions, most writer’s block isn’t writer’s block at all: It’s necessary time that allows the unconscious mind to do its deep work. The great “Ah-Ha!” moments don’t usually come at the keyboard. They come when I’m lying on the floor, staring into space (or banging my head against the wall in frustration). All of a sudden the Unconscious Camera turns on, a movie starts playing in my head-and there it is: The Big Moment. Or the Whole Damn Story. And, in many ways, I had nothing whatsoever to do with it."

"He had writer's block once. It was the worst ten minutes of his life."

"The imagination only becomes becalmed if and when your tale has sailed you into lifeless waters, and you are too stubborn to throw pages away and start over. If your imagination is going into rebellion against you, start throwing pages of the manuscript away, starting with the most recent and moving backward. At a certain point, you will discover the writing block has vanished. Writer's block is your muse's way of telling you that your tale is going wrong. Listen to the muse and try a different approach."

"The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime, Barren of every glorious theme, In distant lands now waits a better time, Producing subjects worthy fame."

"The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru."

"But why should the Americans write books, when a six weeks passage brings them, in their own tongue, our sense, science, and genius, in bales and hogsheads? Prairies, steam-boats, grist-mills, are their natural objects for centuries to come."

"The character of the American literature is, generally speaking, pretty justly appreciated in Europe. The immense exhalation of periodical trash, which penetrates into every cot and corner of the country, and which is greedily sucked in by all ranks, is unquestionably one cause of its inferiority."

"It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along its shores."

"America is now wholly given over to a d——d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash — and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed."

"It would seem that in our great unendowed, unfurnished, unentertained and unentertaining continent, where we all sit sniffing, as it were, the very earth of our foundations, we ought to have leisure to turn out something handsome from the very heart of simple nature."

"I will put in my poems that with you is heroism upon land and sea, And I will report all heroism from an American point of view."

"I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,... The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else..."

"To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin."

"One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare — a hobby more patient than angling."

"Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction—perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided."

"A superior man’s struggle in the world is not with exterior lions, trusts, margraves, policemen, rivals in love, German spies, radicals and tornadoes, but with the obscure, atavistic impulses within him—the impulses, weaknesses and limitations that war with his notion of what life should be. ... The hero of the inferior—i.e., the typically American—novel engages in no such doomed and fateful combat. His conflict is not with the inexplicable ukases of destiny, the limitations of his own strength, the dead hand upon him, but simply with the superficial desires of his elemental fellow men. He thus has a fair chance of winning—and in bad fiction that chance is always converted into a certainty. So he marries the daughter of the owner of the factory and eventually gobbles the factory itself. His success gives thrills to persons who can imagine no higher aspiration. He embodies their optimism, as the other hero embodies the pessimism of more introspective and idealistic men. He is the protagonist of that great majority which is so inferior that it is quite unconscious of its inferiority."

"God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest.... You may have spoken in jest about New York as the capital of culture but in 25 years it will be just as London is now. Culture follows money and all the refinements of aestheticism can’t stave off its change of seat (Christ! what a metaphor). We will be the Romans in the next generation as the English are now."

"In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man."

"American muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land."

"Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

"American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither."

"When you stop to think, the whole idea of comprehension has a faintly archaic taste, like the sound of forgotten tongues or a look into a Victorian camera obscura. We Americans are much higher on simple understanding. It makes it easier to read the billboards when you're heading into town on the expressway at plus-fifty. To comprehend, the mental jaws have to gape wide enough to make the tendons creak. Understanding, however, can be purchased on every paperback-book rack in America."

"I am creating part of American literature, and I was very aware of doing that, of adding to American literature. The critics haven't recognized my work enough as another tradition of American literature."

"Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn."

"When people talk about American literature, they really mean Hemingway, Faulkner and Poe and when they do include women it's Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay. To decide to take that on and say, 'I will speak and will be heard'-that takes a lot of guts."

"At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property."

"The literary America in which I found myself after I published The Twenty-Seventh City bore a strange resemblance to the St. Louis I'd grown up in: a once-great city that had been gutted and drained by white flight and superhighways. Ringing the depressed urban core of serious fiction were prosperous new suburbs of mass entertainments. Much of the inner city’s remaining vitality was concentrated in the black, Hispanic, Asian, gay, and women’s communities that had taken over the structures vacated by fleeing straight white males."

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion [of Mexico] were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists."

"I will make this city an object of horror and something to whistle at. Every last one passing by it will stare in horror and whistle over all its plagues."

"I look before me at my lighted candles, I don’t want to turn around and see with horror How quickly the dark line is lengthening, How quickly the candles multiply that have been put out."

"Recent history has reminded us that racial terror makes for an effective freak show, as anyone following the cycle of police shooting, to protest, to grand jury acquittal already knows. H.P. Lovecraft once wrote of the difference between "mere physical fear" and "cosmic fear": the difference between being grossed out and, in the cosmic extreme, of having one’s sense of how the world works upended. True horror is cosmic fear. It’s there when I pass by cops at night, or when there’s a Confederate flag waving from the truck of a customer in the same restaurant as me. Horror, as Lovecraft described it, beckons "unexplainable dread." Keyword: unexplainable. Racism is no mystery. But whether it’s in store, at any given moment, certainly is."

"The work of horror, it has been argued, is to uncover what a repressive culture like ours would hope is dead and buried. But as far as public discourse is concerned, black culture — more often being repressed than doing the repressing — doesn’t have room or patience for fantasy."

"When I finally took my husband to see Pet Sematary a few months ago, I looked over during the film, and my husband had his hands over his face...it was too funny. Women are wired to give birth, so maybe there's something in us that makes us more immune to horror, films with girls in bikinis getting raped and killed make me angry, but a really chilling horror film where it really gets under your skin and like it really could happen, those are the ones I like."

"“Jokes and horror work on the same mechanism,” said writer Ellis. “Tension and release. For me, it’s more of an instinct for what a scene needs, and listening to the characters speak."

"I was the first publisher in these United States to publish horror comics. I am responsible, I started them. Some may not like them. That is a matter of personal taste. It would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to a Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid."

"Women occupy a privileged place in horror film. The horror genre is a site of entertainment and excitement, of terror and dread, and one that relishes in the complexities that arise when boundaries – of taste, of bodies, or reason – are blurred and dismantled. It is also a site of expression and exploration that leverages the narrative and aesthetic horrors of the reproductive, the maternal and the sexual to expose the underpinnings of the social, political and philosophical othering of women. This is a consistent point of interest, even across the breadth of an already diverse genre and into that which might otherwise be deemed ‘the horrific’."

"Gynaehorror, as I will demonstrate, is horror that deals with all aspects of female reproductive horror, from the reproductive and sexual organs, to virginity and first sex, through to pregnancy, birth and motherhood, and finally to menopause and post-menpause. While my focus is horror film- the space in which such horror makes itself most visible, most fecund, even- this term is one that might be applied more broadly to connect visual representation and aesthetic expression to wider issues of sociocultural and philosophical analysis. This book offers a feminist interrogation of gynaehorror, but also offers a counter-reading of the gynaehorrific, that both accounts for and opens up new spaces within a mode of representation that has often been accused (and, in many cases, rightfully so) of being misogynistic. This is not to try to rehabilitate certain long-standing modes of imagery and narrative whose dominant register can, perhaps, be broadly coloured as anti-woman, but to explore the spaces between and within these modes that might offer more interesting ways of thinking through representation, cinematic expression, the reproductive and the nominally – and monstrously – feminine."

"The horror genre has changed throughout the years depending on what’s going on in the world. A lot of feminists will say the slasher films where women were being butchered were, in some ways, because women were becoming emancipated. They think killing women was a reaction to that, but a lot of times the women, in the end, were the heroes and the only one who lived so it had a feminist edge there. Then when we were all afraid of nuclear weapons there were all these films with Sci-Fi edge things that had been created out of nuclear waste. Who knows, they will always find something that is scary that is relevant to what we are going through. The resurgence of the Mummy came around when the gulf war was going on because people have always found the Middle East kind of mysterious. I think society can breathe “death”, as The Crypt Keeper would say, into horror."

"I've seen horrors, horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror! Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies."

"That is real horror and blood. When the Second World War finished I was 23 and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I’d seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much."

"What was the whole literature of supernatural horror but an essay to make death itself exciting?—wonder and strangeness to life’s very end."

"The horror experience is most scary when the player really isn’t sure whether their character is going to live or die – death and survival need to be on a constant see-saw. If there’s a situation where you’re not 100% sure that you can avoid or defeat the enemies, if you feel maybe there’s a chance you’ll make it – that’s where horror lies. Creating that situation is vital. Also, I don’t want to just stand there shooting dozens of enemies. Die! Die! Die! I don’t have the energy for that."

"Better an end with horror than a horror without end."

"...murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibalism, carnage, necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism ... and virtually every other form of crime, degeneracy, bestiality and horror."

"72% of people report watching at last one horror movie every 6 months, and the reasons for doing so, besides the feelings of fear and anxiety, was primarily that of excitement. Watching horror movies was also an excuse to socialise, with many people preferring to watch horror movies with others than on their own. People found horror that was psychological in nature and based on real events the scariest, and were far more scared by things that were unseen or implied rather than what they could actually see."

"During those times when anxiety is slowly increasing, regions of the brain involved in visual and auditory perception become more active, as the need to attend for cues of threat in the environment become more important. After a sudden shock, brain activity is more evident in regions involved in emotion processing, threat evaluation, and decision making, enabling a rapid response. However, these regions are in continuous talk-back with sensory regions throughout the movie, as if the sensory regions were preparing response networks as a scary event was becoming increasingly likely. Therefore, our brains are continuously anticipating and preparing us for action in response to threat, and horror movies exploit this expertly to enhance our excitement, explains Researcher Matthew Hudson."

"What is almost universally true of horror is that it’s been used as a tool to express social and political discontent for the marginalized since its creation. It’s a kind of popcorn propaganda that’s allowed writers and filmmakers to voice their anxieties while couching them in titillating narratives that would fly below any political censors."

"As far back as 1794, for instance, women like Ann Radcliffe were writing the original Final Girls, like the character of Emily in the Mysteries of Udolpho, who escapes vengeful, domineering men in a creepy old castle to become an autonomous woman. Radcliffe paved the way for Edgar Allan Poe (“The Tell-Tale Heart"), Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and, of course, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein). These authors were popular in their time, but they’ve remained a collective compass for much of the horror to follow, and what they all have in common are concerns with ethics. Horror stories are, at their hearts, morality tales."

"Horror is barely ever on the side of the powerful or the mean. The good writers and filmmakers of the genre can tap into our very real fears and follow them to their logical conclusions."

"Going all the way back to the twenties, the horror movies of the Silent Era with Lon Chaney, there's alot of twisted people. The monster was just a mutilated person. When people came back from World War I they came back without limbs. They came back in somewhat-living pieces."

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme."

"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" He laughed. "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course."

"It is an inconvenient truth that early-7th-century Islamic book-burners copied 4th-century Christians."

"Burning the Bible was an intentional act: it happened all over Germany, in public for all to see, and both those who perpetrated the act and those who watched it perceived it as a transgression whether they supported or opposed the burning."

"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas."

"Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen. (Where one begins by burning books, one will end up burning people.)"

"Sultan Sikander (Aurangzeb) was the most bigoted of the Sultans, and burnt the books of the Hindus whenever and wherever he got them."

"It is not surprising therefore that many Muslim heroes in their hour of victory just set libraries to flames. They razed shrines to the ground, burnt books housed in them and killed Brahman, Jain and Buddhist monks who could read them. The narrative of Ikhtiyaruddin Bakhtiyar Khalji’s campaigns in Bihar is full of such exploits... Similarly, only one instance may be given to show how the Indians tried to protect their books from marauding armies. In the Jinabhadra-Sureshwar temple located in the Jaisalmer Fort in Rajasthan, I saw a library of Jain manuscripts called Jain Cyan Bhandar located in a basement, 5 storeys deep down, each storey negotiated with the help of a staircase, and in each floor manuscripts are stacked. The top of the cell is covered with a large stone slab indistinguishable from other slabs of the flooring to delude the invader. Such basement libraries set up for security against vandalism are also found in other places in Rajasthan."

"For when Alexander conquered the kingdom of Darius the king, he had all [the books] translated into the Greek language. Then he burnt all the original copies which were kept in the treasure-houses of Darius, and killed everyone whom he thought might be keeping any of them. Except that some books were saved through the protection of those who safeguarded them."

"The fundamentalist forces in Kashmir that were in the processes of spreading their tentacles opened their agenda with the declaration of war on books that were not of Islamic brand and hue... The Jammaat-i-Islami as the rabid fundamentalist organisation launched a campaign to ransack libraries in the educational institutions and flared ban on books which did not correspond to their fake knowledge about man, world and God. The Kashmir university funded by the University Grants Commission and headed by the Governor of the state was denuded of two thousand books including the works of Milton, G.B. Shaw, Shakespeare, H.G. Wells and tomes on Hindu Philosphy in a Nazi style. ... The library of the Information Centre run by Government of India was looted by the progeny of Halaku Khan and set on fire. ... The Muslim marauders could not but suppress their innate urge and proclivity to loot, plunder and arson the properties and estates left behind by the fleeing Pandits. They desecrated and destructed their temples, harvested their crops and annexed their lands and to cap it all looted and burnt their books as repositories of learning and knowledge"

"World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power. Book burning was, as author George Orwell remarked, "the most characteristic [Nazi] activity.""

"Sikander burnt all books the same wise as fire burns hay. All the scintillating works faced destruction in the same manner that lotus flowers face with the onset of frosty winter."

"I never taught of book burning, no matter how they were silly, mendacious or propaganda-like because I guide myself by the principle that every book burning was just an introduction to burning (of people) at the stake."

"All books written in Sanskrit and Marathi, whatever their subject matter, were seized by the Inquisition and burnt on the suspicion that they might deal with idolatry. It is probable that valuable non-religious literature dealing with art, literature, sciences, etc., was destroyed indiscriminately, as a consequence. These activities had been initiated in Goa even before the establishment of the Inquisition."

"Everywhere, unthinking mobs of "independent thinkers" wield tired clichés like cudgels, pummeling those who dare question “enlightened” dogma. If “violence never solved anything,” cops wouldn’t have guns and slaves may never have been freed. If it’s better that 10 guilty men go free to spare one innocent, why not free 100 or 1,000,000? Clichés begin arguments, they don’t settle them."

"I have blurbed so many books that they fill a bookcase in my apartment."

"Let’s be clear: blurbs are not a distinguished genre. In 1936 George Orwell described them as “disgusting tripe,” quoting a particularly odious example from the Sunday Times: “If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.” He admitted the impossibility of banning reviews, and proposed instead the adoption of a system for grading novels according to classes, “perhaps quite a rigid one,” to assist hapless readers in choosing among countless life-changing masterpieces. More recently Camille Paglia called for an end to the “corrupt practice of advance blurbs,” plagued by “shameless cronyism and grotesque hyperbole.” Even Stephen King, a staunch supporter of blurbs, winces at their “hyperbolic ecstasies” and calls for sincerity on the part of blurbers."

"Many writers who have hit the best-seller lists or won major awards have a strict policy of not writing blurbs."

"In 2002, I’d finally finished my own decade-long basic science project, and I was getting ready to publish my book A New Kind of Science. In recognition of his early support, I’d mentioned Murray in my long list of acknowledgements in the book, and I thought I’d reach out to him and see if he’d like to write a back-cover blurb. (In the end, Steve Jobs convinced me not to have any back-cover blurbs: “Isaac Newton didn’t have blurbs on the Principia; nor should you on your book”.)"

"The Western misreading of the Soviet system was largely the product of a simple reflex. The Soviet order — indeed, the practice of communism everywhere — was seen as a form of "progressive" hostility to established Western politics and, particularly, economics. It seemed to represent a new system that had rid itself of the market, of exploitation. Whatever its doubtless temporary — or invented — faults (so the thinking went), the Soviet ideology stood for a better world. Thus many Western writers, including Lion Feuchtwanger, Henri Barbusse, and even Romain Rolland, the sensitive follower of Gandhi, spoke out in defense of the purges."

"I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable."

"In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man."

"I would like to comment on the statement by Prof. H-J. Oestern and Prof. J. Probst of the German Trauma Society which appeared in the October 1997 issues of your journal as well as the Anaesthesist. The authors assert that the work of German specialists in these fields is published "primarily" in German language journals. And without any supporting data they assert that the impact factor is not appropriate for judging scientific achievements in trauma surgery and most important that "its use leads to an unjustified disadvantage in comparison with other fields." Where has it been written that such comparisons should be made? In a series of unrelated assertions, none of which are supported by data, claims of bias are made repeatedly. Would these authors assert that German scientists, even in trauma surgery, do not publish in the international journals? In 1997, scientists from Germany published over 77,000 papers in Science Citation Index covered journals -- almost 7.8% of the total ISI database. About 12,000 of those articles were published in German."

"It is absurd to make invidious comparisons between specialist journals and multi-disciplinary general journals like Nature and NEJM. To compare journals you should stick to a particular category as is explained very carefully in the Guide to Journal Citation Reports."

"Citation data and analysis should always be used in combination with other indicators when evaluating departments or individuals. For nation by nation comparisons, there is very little controversy about the use of citation indicators. Further, they have been used in the USA to evaluate 5,000 departments at the leading universities. Similar research assessment exercises are performed in the UK."

"Impact Factor is not a perfect tool to measure the quality of articles but there is nothing better and it has the advantage of already being in existence and is, therefore, a good technique for scientific evaluation. Experience has shown that in each specialty the best journals are those in which it is most difficult to have an article accepted, and these are the journals that have a high impact factor. Most of these journals existed long before the impact factor was devised. The use of impact factor as a measure of quality is widespread because it fits well with the opinion we have in each field of the best journals in our specialty. ... In conclusion, prestigious journals publish papers of high level. Therefore, their impact factor is high, and not the contrary."

"At new year, on the day of rites, the lady libates water on the holy. [...] On the day when the bowls of rations are inspected, Nance also inspects the servants during the appointments. Her chief scribe Nisaba places the precious tablets on her knees and takes a golden stylus in her hand. She arranges the servants in single file for Nance and then it will be decided whether or not a leather-clad servant can enter before her in his leather, whether or not a linen-clad servant can pass before her in his linen. Any registered and [...] hired person about whom observers and witnesses claim to witness his fleeing from the house will be terminated in his position. [...] The king who always cares for the faithful servants, Haia, the man in charge of registration, registers on a tablet him who is said to be a faithful servant of his lady but deletes from the tablet her who is said not to be the maidservant of her lady."

"Because, Renisenb, it is so easy and it costs so little labour to write down ten bushels of barley, or a hundred head of cattle, or ten fields of spelt - and the thing that is written will come to seem like the real thing, and so the writer and the scribe will come to despise the man who ploughs the fields and reaps the barley and raises the cattle - but all the same the fields and the cattle are real - they are not just marks of inks on papyrus. And when all the records and all the papyrus rolls are destroyed and the scribes are scattered, the men who toil and reap will go on, and Egypt will still live."

"The wisdom of a scribe cometh by his time of leisure: and he that is less in action, shall receive wisdom."

"If a scribe knows only a single line but his handwriting is good, he is indeed a scribe!"

"What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?"

"The scribe trained in counting is deficient on clay. The scribe skilled with clay is deficient in counting."

"A chattering scribe's guilt is great."

"A scribe who does not know how to grasp the meaning -- from where will he produce a translation?"

"The pencil that once freely traced the line Along the ruler’s straight and even side— The blade that shaped the reed-pen’s edges fine— The ruler too, the hand’s unswerving guide— The rugged pumice-stone, whose rasping kiss Sharpened the blunted reed-pen’s double lip— The sponge, uptorn from Neptune’s deep abyss, To cleanse the text from accidental slip— The desk of many cells, that did contain His ink, and all materials of his trade— The scribe to Hermes gives. After long strain, Palsied by age, his hand to rest is laid."

"His speech was substantial, and its contents extensive. The messenger, whose mouth was heavy, was not able to repeat it. Because the messenger, whose mouth was tired, was not able to repeat it, the lord of Kulaba patted some clay and wrote the message as if on a tablet. Formerly, the writing of messages on clay was not established. Now, under that sun and on that day, it was indeed so. The lord of Kulaba inscribed the message like a tablet. It was just like that."

"The scribe trained in counting is deficient on clay. The scribe skilled with clay is deficient in counting."

"At new year, on the day of rites, the lady libates water on the holy. [...] On the day when the bowls of rations are inspected, Nanshe also inspects the servants during the appointments. Her chief scribe Nisaba places the precious tablets on her knees and takes a golden stylus in her hand. [...] The king who always cares for the faithful servants, Haia, the man in charge of registration, registers on a tablet him who is said to be a faithful servant of his lady but deletes from the tablet her who is said not to be the maidservant of her lady."

"Frequent representations had of late been made to the Lord Mayor, of the alarm excited by a miscreant, who haunted the lanes and lonely places in the neighbourhood of the metropolis, for the purpose of terrifying women and children. For some time these statements were supposed to be greatly exaggerated. However, the matter was put beyond a doubt by the following circumstance. A Mr. Alsop, who residing in Bearbing-lane, a lonely spot between the villages of Bow and Oldford, attended at Lambeth-street office, with his three daughters to state the particulars of an outrageous assault upon one of his daughters, by a fellow who goes by the name of the Suburban ghost, or "spring-heeled Jack." Miss Janes Alsop, one of the young ladies, gave the following evidence. About a quarter to nine o'clock on the preceding night, she heard a violent ringing at the gate in front of the house ; and on going to the door to see what was the matter, she saw a man standing outside ; of whom she inquired what was the matter. The person instantly replied, that he was a policeman ; and said, " For God's sake bring me a light, for we have caught spring-heeled Jack here in the lane." She returned into the house, and brought a candle, and handed it to the person ; who appeared enveloped in a large cloak. The instant she had done so, however, he threw off his outer garment, and applying the lighted candle to his breast, presented a most hideous and frightful appearance, and vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flame from his mouth, and his eyes resembled red balls of fire. From the hasty glance which her fright enabled her to get at his person, she observed that he wore a large helmet ; and his dress, which appeared to fit him very tight, seemed to her,toresemble white oilskin. Without uttering a sentence he darted at her, and catching her partly by her dress and the back part of her neck, placed her head under one of his arms, and commenced tearing her gown with his claws, which she was certain were of some metallic substance. She screamed out as loud as she could for assistance ; and by considerable exertion got away from him, and ran towards the house to get in. Her assailant, however, followed her, and caught her on the steps leading to the hall-door ; when he again used considerable violence, tore her neck and arms with his claws, as well as a quantity of hair from her head : but she was at length rescued from his grasp by one of her sisters. Miss Alsop added, that she had suffered considerably all night from the shock she had sustained ; and was then in extreme pain, both from the injury done to her arm, and the wounds and scratches inflicted by the miscreant on her shoulders and neck, with his claws or hands. This story was fully confirmed by Mr. Alsop and his other daughters. One of the daughters said, that the fellow kept knocking and ringing at the gate after she had dragged er sister away from him, but scampered off when she shouted from an upper window for a policeman. He left his cloak behind him ; which some one else picked up, and ran off with."

"During the 1850’s and 60’s Spring-heeled Jack was also seen all over England, particularly in the Midlands. The Army in 1870 set traps to catch him after scared sentries reported being terrified by a man who sprang on to the roof of their sentry box. Also in 1870, angry townsfolk in Lincoln are reported to have shot at him in the street, but he just laughed and bounded away, leaping over fences, and even small buildings!"

"For a while, as no-one really had any idea who he was, suspicion rested on the eccentric young Marquis of Waterford, but he was never vicious, even though he was considered ‘wild’ by Victorian society, and been branded as the ‘Mad Marquis’. Spring-heeled Jack was last seen in 1904 at Everton in Liverpool, bounding up and down the streets, leaping from cobbles to rooftops and back! He vanished into the darkness when some brave souls tried to corner him and he has not been seen since that day to this! The puzzle remains…who was Spring-heeled Jack?"

"The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course."

"A great deal of writing is not "plotted"—most of my essays have no plot structure, they are a ramble in the woods, or a ramble in the basement of my mind."

"As President of the Akademi, I may tell you quite frankly that I would not like the Prime Minister to interfere with my work."

"Sahitya Akademi held a place of pride in the world of Indian literature. There was no comparable institution at that time. Every Indian writer wanted to be connected to it in some way or the other."

"I like Sahitya Akademi were not able to live up to the original mandates set out by their founding fathers."

"I call myself a promiscuous spender and I think that caught Harlequin's eye. It's more peer-oriented and not 'ivory tower' talking"

"Romance depends not just on desire and affection but also on isolation from the claims of everyday life. It is on this point that these romantic comedies come closest to fitting the usual definition of the prose romance—as distinguished from the novel—one of the features of which is a setting far removed from everyday life: the forest, the ocean, a desert island, and the like. And yet in the Hollywood comedies I am discussing, most of the action takes place well within everyday settings."

"Shakespeare, from his very first experiment in the genre, conceived of the love comedy—the romantic comedy—as of something typically Italian, and for this reason he favoured the choice of Italian names for the main characters and, at least in the earliest examples, of Italian locations for the action."

"Even though I enjoy Hollywood romantic comedies like Notting Hill, it’s like they wear galoshes compared to the sly wit of a movie like Autumn Tale. They stomp squishy-footed through their clockwork plots, while Rohmer elegantly seduces us with people who have all of the alarming unpredictability of life. There’s never a doubt that Julia Roberts will live happily ever after. But Magali, now: One wrong step, and she’s alone with her vines forever."

"Romantic comedy was reborn in the films of the 1930s and ’40s. The distinction between a romantic comedy and the modern sense of romance is apparent in a comparison of [Leo McCarey's Love Affair] (1939), which the director remade as An Affair to Remember (1957). Both of these films are unequivocally modern romances, while Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle (1993), a film that pays extensive homage to An Affair to Remember, is clearly a romantic comedy."

"I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. …. There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character."

"Today it’s no secret that movie studios release blockbuster action films to meet the higher energy levels of summer audiences, more intellectual fare for the winter months, and romantic comedies for spring. They don’t do it out of any sense of loyalty to our natural chronobiological rhythms, but because it’s good business."

"So Hector spake; and Trojans roar’d applause; Then loosed their sweating horses from the yoke, And each beside his chariot bound his own; And oxen from the city, and goodly sheep In haste they drove, and honey-hearted wine And bread from out the houses brought, and heap’d Their firewood, and the winds from off the plain Roll’d the rich vapor far into the heaven. And these all night upon the bridge of war Sat glorying; many a fire before them blazed: As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley, and the immeasurable heavens Break open to their highest, and all the stars Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart: So many a fire between the ships and stream Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy, A thousand on the plain; and close by each Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire; And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds, Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn."

"So saying, light-foot Iris pass’d away. Then rose Achilles dear to Zeus; and round The warrior’s puissant shoulders Pallas flung Her fringèd ægis, and around his head The glorious goddess wreath’d a golden cloud, And from it lighted an all-shining flame. As when a smoke from a city goes to heaven Far off from out an island girt by foes, All day the men contend in grievous war From their own city, and with set of sun Their fires flame thickly, and aloft the glare Flies streaming, if perchance the neighbours round May see, and sail to help them in the war; So from his head the splendour went to heaven. From wall to dyke he stept, he stood, nor join’d The Achaeans—honouring his wise mother’s word— There standing, shouted; Pallas far away Call’d; and a boundless panic shook the foe. For like the clear voice when a trumpet shrills, Blown by the fierce beleaguerers of a town, So rang the clear voice of Æakidês; And when the brazen cry of Æakidês Was heard among the Trojans, all their hearts Were troubled, and the full-maned horses whirl’d The chariots backward, knowing griefs at hand; And sheer-astounded were the charioteers To see the dread, unweariable fire That always o’er the great Peleion’s head Burnt, for the bright-eyed goddess made it burn. Thrice from the dyke he sent his mighty shout, Thrice backward reel’d the Trojans and allies; And there and then twelve of their noblest died Among their spears and chariots. The Achæans Eagerly dragg’d Patroclus from the fight And laid him on a bier. His friends stood round Weeping, and with them swift Achilles went And shed hot tears, seeing his faithful friend Laid on the litter, pierc’d with sharp-edg’d bronze;— Him had he sent with chariots and horses To war, but never welcomed his return."

"So follow’d, Rustum left his tents, and cross’d The camp, and to the Persian host appear’d. And all the Persians knew him, and with shouts Hail’d; but the Tartars knew not who he was. And dear as the wet diver to the eyes Of his pale wife who waits and weeps on shore, By sandy Bahrein, in the Persian Gulf, Plunging all day in the blue waves, at night, Having made up his tale of precious pearls, Rejoins her in their hut upon the sands— So dear to the pale Persians Rustum came. And Rustum to the Persian front advanc’d, And Sohrab arm’d in Haman’s tent, and came. And as afield the reapers cut a swathe Down through the middle of a rich man’s corn, And on each side are squares of standing corn, And in the midst a stubble, short and bare; So on each side were squares of men, with spears Bristling, and in the midst, the open sand. And Rustum came upon the sand, and cast His eyes towards the Tartar tents, and saw Sohrab come forth, and ey’d him as he came. As some rich woman, on a winter’s morn, Eyes through her silken curtains the poor drudge Who with numb blacken’d fingers makes her fire— At cock-crow, on a starlit winter’s morn, When the frost flowers the whiten’d window panes— And wonders how she lives, and what the thoughts Of that poor drudge may be; so Rustum ey’d The unknown adventurous Youth, who from afar Came seeking Rustum, and defying forth All the most valiant chiefs: long he perus’d His spirited air, and wonder’d who he was. For very young he seem’d, tenderly rear’d; Like some young cypress, tall, and dark, and straight, Which in a queen’s secluded garden throws Its slight dark shadow on the moonlit turf, By midnight, to a bubbling fountain’s sound— So slender Sohrab seem’d, so softly rear’d. And a deep pity enter’d Rustum’s soul As he beheld him coming; [...]"

"There is such a thing as American Indian literature, and it can be divided into several interlocking categories. The major divisions are traditional literature and genre literature of the present. Traditional literature can be further divided into ceremonial and popular varieties—that is, into canonical works and those that derive from the canon but that are widely told and appeal to audiences gathered on social occasions. Contemporary works, or genre literature, can be divided into the classic western categories of poetry, short fiction, the novel, and drama, with the addition of autobiography, as-told-to narrative, and mixed genre works. Structural and thematic elements from the oral tradition, usually from the writer’s own tribe, always show up in contemporary works by American Indians, and elements from contemporary, non-Indian works sometimes show up in contemporaneous tribal social literature."

"Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn."

"The whole body of American Indian literature, from its traditional, ceremonial aspects to its formal literary aspects, forms a field, or, we might say, a hoop dance, and as such is a dynamic, vital whole whose different expressions refer to a tradition that is unified and coherent on its own terms. It is a literary tradition that is breathtaking in its aesthetic realization and fundamental to coherent understanding of non-Indian varieties of American literature."

"The great mythic and ceremonial cycles of the American Indian peoples are neither primitive, in any meaningful sense of the word, nor necessarily the province of the folk; much of the literature, in fact, is known only to educated, specialized persons who are privy to the philosophical, mystical, and literary wealth of their own tribe. Much of the literature that was in the keeping of such persons, engraved perfectly and completely in their memories, was not known to most other men and women. Because of this, much literature has been lost as the last initiates of particular tribes and societies within the tribes died, leaving no successors."

"The tribes seek—through song, ceremony, legend, sacred stories (myths), and tales—to embody, articulate, and share reality, to bring the isolated, private self into harmony and balance with this reality, to verbalize the sense of the majesty and reverent mystery of all things, and to actualize, in language, those truths that give to humanity its greatest significance and dignity. To a large extent, ceremonial literature serves to redirect private emotion and integrate the energy generated by emotion within a cosmic framework. The artistry of the tribes is married to the essence of language itself, for through language one can share one’s singular being with that of the community and know within oneself the communal knowledge of the tribe. In this art, the greater self and all-that-is are blended into a balanced whole, and in this way the concept of being that is the fundamental and sacred spring of life is given voice and being for all."

"Those reared in traditional American Indian societies are inclined to relate events and experiences to one another. They do not organize perceptions or external events in terms of dualities or priorities. This egalitarianism is reflected in the structure of American Indian literature, which does not rely on conflict, crisis, and resolution for organization, nor does its merit depend on the parentage, education, or connections of the author. Rather, its significance is determined by its relation to creative empowerment, its reflection of tribal understandings, and its relation to the unitary nature of reality."

"The two forms basic to American Indian literature are the ceremony and the myth. The ceremony is the ritual enactment of a specialized perception of a cosmic relationship, while the myth is a prose record of that relationship. [...] The formal structure of a ceremony is as holistic as the universe it purports to reflect and respond to, for the ceremony contains other forms such as incantation, song (dance), and prayer, and it is itself the central mode of literary expression from which all allied songs and stories derive. The Lakota view all the ceremonies as related to one another in various explicit and implicit ways, as though each were one face of a multifaceted prism. This interlocking of the basic forms has led to much confusion among non-Indian collectors and commentators, and this complexity makes all simplistic treatments of American Indian literature more confusing than helpful. Indeed, the non-Indian tendency to separate things from one another—be they literary forms, species, or persons—causes a great deal of unnecessary difficulty with and misinterpretation of American Indian life and culture. It is reasonable, from an Indian point of view, that all literary forms should be interrelated, given the basic idea of the unity and relatedness of all the phenomena of life. Separation of parts into this or that category is not agreeable to American Indians, and the attempt to separate essentially unified phenomena results in distortion."

"Underlying all their complexity, traditional American Indian literatures possess a unity and harmony of symbol, structure, and articulation that is peculiar to the American Indian world. This harmony is based on the perceived harmony of the universe and on thousands of years of refinement. This essential sense of unity among all things flows like a clear stream through the songs and stories of the peoples of the western hemisphere. [...] It remains for scholars of American Indian literature to look at this literature from the point of view of its people. Only from this vantage can we understand fully the richness, complexity, and true meaning of a people’s life; only in this way can we all learn the lessons of the past on this continent and the essential lesson of respect for all that is."

"Et in Arcadia ego."

"Even in Arcadia, there am I [i.e. Death]"

"Polonius: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men."

"In time of yore when shepherds dwelt Upon the mountain rocks, And simple people never felt The pain of lovers’ mocks; But little birds would carry tales ’Twixt Susan and her sweeting, And all the dainty nightingales Did sing at lovers’ meeting: Then might you see what looks did pass Where shepherds did assemble, And where the life of true love was When hearts could not dissemble.Then yea and nay was thought an oath That was not to be doubted, And when it came to faith and troth We were not to be flouted. Then did they talk of curds and cream, Of butter, cheese and milk; There was no speech of sunny beam Nor of the golden silk. Then for a gift a row of pins, A purse, a pair of knives, Was all the way that love begins; And so the shepherd wives.But now we have so much ado, And are so sore aggrievèd, That when we go about to woo We cannot be believèd; Such choice of jewels, rings and chains, That may but favour move, And such intolerable pains Ere one can hit on love; That if I still shall bide this life ’Twixt love and deadly hate, I will go learn the country life Or leave the lover’s state."

"O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!"

"Idle reader: thou mayest believe me without any oath that I would this book, as it is the child of my brain, were the fairest, gayest, and cleverest that could be imagined. But I could not counteract Nature’s law that everything shall beget its like; and what, then, could this sterile, illtilled wit of mine beget but the story of a dry, shrivelled, whimsical offspring, full of thoughts of all sorts and such as never came into any other imagination—just what might be begotten in a prison, where every misery is lodged and every doleful sound makes its dwelling? Tranquillity, a cheerful retreat, pleasant fields, bright skies, murmuring brooks, peace of mind, these are the things that go far to make even the most barren muses fertile, and bring into the world births that fill it with wonder and delight."

"Where’er you find ‘the cooling western breeze,’ In the next line, it ‘whispers thro’ the trees;’ If crystal streams ‘with pleasing murmurs creep,’ The reader’s threaten’d (not in vain) with ‘sleep;’ Then, at the last and only couplet, fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along."

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

"Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons."

"Of writing well be sure the secret lies In wisdom: therefore study to be wise."

"Scribentem juvat ipse favor, minuitque laborem, Cumque suo crescens pectore fervet opus."

"Favour assists and cheers the author’s art, And, as it grows, his work comes from the heart."

"Studiis florentem ignobilis oti."

"Indulging in the studies of inglorious leisure."

"Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, æquam Viribus, et versate diu quid ferre recusent, Quid valeant humeri. Cui lecta potenter erit res, Nec facundia deseret hunc, nec lucidus ordo."

"Good authors, take a brother bard’s advice: Ponder your subject o’er not once or twice, And oft and oft consider if the weight You hope to lift be, or be not too great. Let but our theme be equal to our powers, Choice language, clear arrangement, both are ours."

"Servetur ad imum Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet."

"See it be wrought on one consistent plan, And end the same creation it began."

"A clean tablet, one from which the writing has been erased. A blank sheet of paper. A clean slate."

"La dernière chose qu’on trouve en faisant un ouvrage, est de scavoir celle quil faut mettre la première."

"In writing a book, the last thing that one learns is to know what to put first."

"Ce que l'on concoit bien s’énonce clairement Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément."

"A felicitous thought is as clearly exprest, And true words are not wanting in which it is drest."

"Verbaque provisam rem non invita sequentur."

"Non satis est pulcra esse poemata; dulcia sunto, Et quocumque volent animum auditoris agunto."

"Mere grace is not enough: a play should thrill The hearer’s soul, and move it at its will."

"Dans l’art d’intéresser consiste l’art d’écrire."

"The art of writing consists in the art of interesting the reader."

"Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci, Lectorem delectando pariterque monendo."

"All votes he gains who can unite Profit with pleasure, and delight His reader’s fancy, all the time He gives instruction couched in rhyme."

"Τu nihil invita dices faciesve Minerva."

"Beware of attempting anything (in literary composition) for which nature has not gifted you—i.e., against the grain."

"Dura Exerce imperia, et ramos compesce fluentes."

"Exert a rigorous sway, And lop the too luxuriant boughs away."

"Multa quidem scripsi: sed que vitiosa putavi Emendaturis ignibus ipse dedi."

"I’ve written much; but what I thought to blame I threw, correctively, into the flame."

"Quum relego, scripsisse pudet: quia plurima cerno Me quoque qui feci judice, digna lini."

"When I read what I’ve written, I’m often abased; There’s so much in my judgment that should be erased."

"Scribimus, et scriptos absumimus igne libellos; Exitus est studii parva favilla mei."

"I write, and throw into the flame what’s writ; A little ash is all that comes of it."

"At qui legitimum cupiet fecisse poema, Cum tabulis animum censoris sumat honesti: Audebit, queecunque parum splendoris habebunt Et sine pondere erunt, et honore indigna ferentur, Verba movere loco."

"But he who meditates a work of art, Oft as he writes will act the censor’s part: Is there a word wants nobleness and grace, Devoid of weight, nor worthy of high place? He bids it go though stiffly it decline, And cling and cling like suppliant to a shrine."

"Hâtez-vous lentement; et sans perdre courage, Vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage: Polissez-le sans cesse et le repolissez; Ajoutez quelquefois, et souvent effacez."

"Hasten then, but full slowly: don’t lose heart of grace; And your work twenty times on the easel replace. Be continually polishing; polish again; Add something to this part; through that draw your pen."

"Limæ labor ac mora."

"The labour and tediousness of polishing (any work of art, poetry, painting, etc.) as though with a file."

"Sæpe stilum vertas, iterum que digna legi sint Scripturus; neque te ut miretur turba labores, Contentus paucis lectoribus."

"Oh yes! believe me, you must draw your pen Not once or twice, but o’er and o’er again Through what you’ve written, if you would entice The man that reads you once to read you twice, Not making popular applause your cue, But looking to fit audience, although few."

"For diff’rent styles with diff’rent subjects sort, As sev’ral garbs with country, town, and court."

"For there is no art where there is no style, and no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual."

"From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is one whose style recognizes the beauty of the material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the æsthetic effect."

"I can't listen to anyone unless he attracts me by a charming style or by beauty of theme."

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

"Le style c’est l’homme."

"The style shows the man."

"Ce qui n’est pas clair, n’est pas Français."

"What is not clear (intelligible) is not French."

"Clarus ob obscuram linguam magis inter inanes Quamde graves inter Graios qui vera requirunt: Omnia enim stolidi magis admirantur amantque Inversis que sub verbis latitantia cernunt."

"His obscure style took with the shallower pates, (Not with the serious Greeks who ask for facts): For nothing captivates your dull man more Than dark, involved, mysterious verbiage."

"Decipimur specie recti; brevis esse laboro, Obscurus fio."

"We aim at the ideal, and fail. I try To be concise, and end in being obscure."

"Non liquet."

"It is not evident."

"Obscuris vera involvens."

"Cloaking the truth in mystery."

"Cela doit être beau, car je n’y comprends rien."

"That ought to be fine, for I don’t understand a word of it."

"Ornari res ipsa negat, contenta docere."

"The subject of itself is incompatible with an ornamental style, content if it is able to instruct."

"Verba nitent phaleris, at nullas verba medullas Intus habent."

"The words make a fine show, but they have no pith in them."

"Consuetudinem sermonis vocabo consensum eruditorum; sicut vivendi consensum bonorum."

"The practice of educated men is the best standard of language, just as the lives of the good are our pattern in morals."

"Fungar vice cotis, acutum Reddere quæ ferrum valet, exsors ipsa secandi. Munus et officium, nil scribens ipse, docebo."

"Mine be the whetstone’s lot Which makes steel sharp, though cut itself will not. Although no writer, I may yet impart To writing folk the precepts of their art."

"Ne forçons point notre talent, Nous ne ferions rien avec grâce."

"Don’t force your powers unduly, if you aim at a graceful effect."

"Occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros."

"Like warmed-up cabbage served at each repast, The repetition kills the wretch at last."

"Sæpe stilum vertas, iterum que digna legi sint Scripturus; neque te ut miretur turba labores, Contentus paucis lectoribus."

"Oh yes! believe me, you must draw your pen Not once or twice, but o’er and o’er again Through what you’ve written, if you would entice The man that reads you once to read you twice, Not making popular applause your cue, But looking to fit audience, although few."

"Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, æquam Viribus, et versate diu quid ferre recusent, Quid valeant humeri. Cui lecta potenter erit res, Nec facundia deseret hunc, nec lucidus ordo."

"Good authors, take a brother bard’s advice: Ponder your subject o’er not once or twice, And oft and oft consider if the weight You hope to lift be, or be not too great. Let but our theme be equal to our powers, Choice language, clear arrangement, both are ours."

"Ornata hoc ipso, quod ornamenta neglexerant."

"Ornate for the very reason that ornament had been neglected."

"Plus aloes quam mellis habet."

"He has in him more aloes than honey."

"Ce que l'on concoit bien s’énonce clairement Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément."

"A felicitous thought is as clearly exprest, And true words are not wanting in which it is drest."

"Est brevitate opus ut currat sententia."

"Terseness there wants to make the thought ring clear."

"Ante mare, et tellus, et, quod tegit omnia cœlum, Unus erat toto nature vultus in orbe, Quem dixere Chaos; rudis indigestaque moles."

"Ere sea, and land and heaven’s vault were made, Nature, throughout the globe, bore one aspect, Called chaos—a rude and undigested mass."

"Arenæ funis effici non potest."

"You can’t make a rope of sand."

"Velut egri somnia, vanæ Fingentur species, ut nec pes, nec caput uni Reddatur formæ."

"Like sick men’s dreams, when shadowy images appear, and nether head nor feet fit their respective forms."

"Le secret d’ennuyer est celui de tout dire."

"The surest way of wearying your readers is to say everything that can be said on the subject."

"Quot pæne verba, tot sententiæ sunt; quot sensus, tot victoriæ."

"Almost every word is a sentence in itself, and every thought amounts to a demonstration."

"Difficilis optimi perfectio atque absolutio."

"Perfection and finish of the highest kind is very hard to attain."

"Limæ labor ac mora."

"The labour and tediousness of polishing (any work of art, poetry, painting, etc.) as though with a file."

"Ore rotundo."

"In well-turned phrase."

"Nec pluteum credit, nec demorsos sapit ungues."

"It does not smack of the desk, or bitten nails."

"Nihil est hirsutius illis."

"Nothing can be more rugged."

"Anybody can write a short story—a bad one, I mean—who has industry and paper and time enough; but not everyone may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills."

"Our modern attraction to short stories is not an accident of form; it is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and fragility; it means that existence is only an impression, and, perhaps, only an illusion. A short story of to-day has the air of a dream; it has the irrevocable beauty of a falsehood; we get a glimpse of grey streets of London or red plains of India, as in an opium vision; we see people,—arresting people, with fiery and appealing faces. But when the story is ended, the people are ended. We have no instinct of anything ultimate and enduring behind the episodes. The moderns, in a word, describe life in short stories because they are possessed with the sentiment that life itself is an uncommonly short story, and perhaps not a true one."

"... there are more goodish novels than there are good short stories, and I think a short story has to be very good to have any effect. And I think that you could probably... 100 short stories would be all there are, almost. Really great short stories. That’s probably not true, but there are so few really great short stories. A novel is a big bulky thing, you know. I suppose, well, with Kipling’s stories they’ve had a great effect, and O. Henry’s stories have. Shall we say that I think a great short story teller should have as much effect as a great novelist. I think that’s the answer, isn’t it, but there are so few. They really are. Maugham and O. Henry, Kipling, Maupassant. They’re not... Bret Harte’s done a few, but there’re not a great many."

"The book review is a specific and applied form of , and is distinguished in several ways from criticism in general. In the first place, whereas criticism in general may be concerned with an author's entire work, or with that of a group of writers or of a period, the review usually is limited to a single book. While, of course, it may compare the book with others by the same author or by other writers, its interest is centered in the single work. Another difference is this: while criticism in general often takes for granted that the reader is more or less familiar with the authors and books being discussed, the review takes less for granted. One reason for this that readers of book reviews—especially reviews that appear in newspapers—are likely to be less informed and less sophisticated than readers of criticism in general."

"A book review serves two major functions—descriptive and evaluative. It first of all can indicate to the some general idea of the contents and it can offer a critique, an evaluation of merit. The two functions are rather distinct and yet they belong together."

"Book reviewing can be a delightful writing experience for those who read quickly, are able to formulate an analysis easily, and enjoy crafting essays. Writing about a book gives us the opportunity to clarify, organize, and analyse the swirling impressions and ideas that are generated from our reading. When we evaluate a book, we sharpen our critical skills, learning about our identity as readers and discovering strategies for conveying our responses to other readers."

"Rarely used words, non-English words, names, obsolete and unidiomatic expressions, phrases: all are thrown in together along with common words without any apparent principle of selection. For example, in the fourth edition of – one of the best of the conceptually arranged works – we find included under the subheading orator: Demosthenes, Cicero, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, William Jennings Bryan. Why not Pericles and Billy Graham? When one starts to include types of things, where does one stop? There is actually a list of insects (paragraph 414.36), which is even more of a random sampling than that of orators. Such works are a potpourri of everything the compiler can think of."

"In the search for words, thesauruses are useful things, but they don't talk about the words they list. They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better. The value of a thesaurus is not to make a writer seem to have a vast vocabulary of recondite words. The value of a thesaurus is in the assistance it can give you in finding the best possible word for the mission that the word is supposed to fulfill. Writing teachers and journalism courses have been known to compare them to crutches and to imply that no writer of any character or competence would use them. At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary."

"Thesauri are valuable structures for Information Retrieval systems. A thesaurus provides a precise and controlled vocabulary which serves to coordinate document indexing and document retrieval. In both indexing and retrieval, a thesaurus may be used to select the most appropriate terms. Additionally, the thesaurus can assist the searcher in reformulating search strategies if required. This chapter first examines the important features of thesauri. This should allow the reader to differentiate between thesauri. Next, a brief overview of the manual thesaurus construction process is given. Two major approaches for automatic thesaurus construction have been selected for detailed examination. The first is on thesaurus construction from collections of documents, and the second, on thesaurus construction by merging existing thesauri. These two methods were selected since they rely on statistical techniques alone and are also significantly different from each other."

"Greek literature is a Near Eastern literature."

"The Bildungsroman is a sort of laboratory in which the hero conducts an experiment in living. For this reason, it is a particularly useful medium for writers whose main concern is a philosophical answer to the practical question: What shall we do with our lives? Moreover, it is an interesting observation that as soon as a writer is seized with the need to treat a problem he feels seriously about in a novel, the novel automatically becomes a sort of Bildungsroman. The Bildungsroman is the natural form of serious fictional art,"

"One cannot say that the petty bourgeois has never read anything. On the contrary, he has read everything, devoured everything."

"Ōs byþ ordfruma ǣlcre sprǣce wīsdōmes wraþu and wītena frōfur and eorla gehwām ēadnys and tō hiht."

"Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning; or, pure, ornate, and grotesque art in English poetry."

"For this Anthology I have tried to range over the whole field of English Verse from the beginning, or from the Thirteenth Century to this closing year of the Nineteenth, and to choose the best. Nor have I sought in these Islands only, but wheresoever the Muse has followed the tongue which among living tongues she most delights to honour."

"The Muses’ house has many mansions: their hospitality has outlived many policies of State, more than a few religions, countless heresies—tamen usque recurret Apollo—and it were profane to misdoubt the Nine as having forsaken these so long favoured islands. Of experiment I still hold myself fairly competent to judge. But, writing in 1939, I am at a loss what to do with a fashion of morose disparagement; of sneering at things long by catholic consent accounted beautiful; of scorning at ‘Man’s unconquerable mind’ and hanging up (without benefit of laundry) our common humanity as a rag on a clothes-line. Be it allowed that these present times are dark. Yet what are our poets of use—what are they for—if they cannot hearten the crew with auspices of daylight?"

"The reader, turning the pages of this book, will find this note of valiancy—of the old Roman ‘virtue’ mated with cheerfulness—dominant throughout, if in many curious moods. He may trace it back, if he care, far behind Chaucer to the rudest beginnings of English Song. It Is indigenous, proper to our native spirit, and it will endure."

"I dip my hat to Chaucer, Swilling soup from his saucer,And to Master Shakespeare Who wrote big on small beer.The abstemious Wordsworth Subsisted on a curd’s-worth,But a slick one was Tennyson, Putting gravy on his venison. ...The influence of Milton Came wry out of Stilton.Sing a song for Percy Shelley, Drowned in pale lemon jelly,And for precious John Keats, Dripping blood of pickled beets.Then there was poor Willie Blake, He foundered on sweet cake."

"Pharaoh is he who eats men and lives on gods... Their big ones are for his morning meal, their middle-sized ones are for his evening meal, their little ones are for his night meal, their old men and their old women are for his incense-burning."

"Rhea was subject in love to Cronos and bare splendid children ... These great Cronos swallowed as each came forth from the womb to his mother's knees with this intent, that no other of the proud sons of Heaven should hold the kingly office amongst the deathless gods. For he learned from Earth and starry Heaven that he was destined to be overcome by his own son, strong though he was, through the contriving of great Zeus. Therefore he kept no blind outlook, but watched and swallowed down his children: and unceasing grief seized Rhea. But when she was about to bear Zeus, the father of gods and men, then she besought her own dear parents, Earth and starry Heaven, to devise some plan with her that the birth of her dear child might be concealed, and that retribution might overtake great, crafty Cronos for his own father and also for the children whom he had swallowed down. And they readily heard and obeyed their dear daughter, and told her all that was destined to happen touching Cronos the king and his stout-hearted son. So they sent her to Lyctus, to the rich land of Crete, when she was ready to bear great Zeus, the youngest of her children. Him did vast Earth receive from Rhea in wide Crete to nourish and to bring up. Thither came Earth carrying him swiftly through the black night to Lyctus first, and took him in her arms and hid him in a remote cave beneath the secret places of the holy earth on thick-wooded Mount Aegeum; but to the mightily ruling son of Heaven, the earlier king of the gods, she gave a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. Then he took it in his hands and thrust it down into his belly: wretch! he knew not in his heart that in place of the stone his son was left behind, unconquered and untroubled, and that he was soon to overcome him by force and might and drive him from his honours, himself to reign over the deathless gods."

"And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat. And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you."

"And it came to pass after this, that Benhadad king of Syria gathered all his host, and went up, and besieged Samaria. And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they besieged it, until an ass's head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove's dung for five pieces of silver. And as the king of Israel was passing by upon the wall, there cried a woman unto him, saying, Help, my lord, O king. And he said, If the do not help thee, whence shall I help thee? out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress? And the king said unto her, What aileth thee? And she answered, This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will eat my son to morrow. So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him: and she hath hid her son. And it came to pass, when the king heard the words of the woman, that he rent his clothes; and he passed by upon the wall, and the people looked, and, behold, he had sackcloth within upon his flesh."

"Procne seized and dragged the frightened boy to a most lonely section of the house; ... But Philomela cut through his tender throat. Then they together, mangled his remains, still quivering with the remnant of his life, and boiled a part of him in steaming pots, that bubbled over with the dead child's blood, and roasted other parts on hissing spits. And, after all was ready, Procne bade her husband, Tereus, to the loathsome feast.... Tereus, majestic on his ancient throne high in imagined state, devoured his son, and gorged himself with flesh of his own flesh – and in his rage of gluttony called out for Itys to attend and share the feast!"

"And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom."

"I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.... Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me. This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever."

"He then cut up the body into pieces, amputated the prominent parts from the shoulder, and the fleshy portions from the arms, from the ligamentous attachments, which connected them with the body, with unshaken nerves! He strips off the flesh from the various limbs, and chops up the different bones,—he keeps back the heads, however, and those very hands, which had once signalized their confidence in him!"

"The father, Thyestes, carves up his own sons, served up on the platter and chews with a relish, in his unfortunate mouth, his own offspring. His appearance is smart, with his locks extravagantly anointed with perfumed grease, but he feels rather oppressed with the wine, with which he has washed down his own flesh and blood! Frequently during the meal, his throat seems to rebel and refuse a passage to the wicked viands, but there was one redeeming feature, one favorable point, connected with all this wickedness, oh! Thyestes! and it was this, thy ignorance of what was being done!"

"And when morning came with its sheen and shone, we arose and walked about the island to the right and left, till we came in sight of an inhabited house afar off. So we made towards it, and ceased not walking till we reached the door thereof when lo! a number of naked men issued from it and without saluting us or a word said, laid hold of us masterfully and carried us to their king, who signed us to sit. So we sat down and they set food before us such 36as we knew not and whose like we had never seen in all our lives. My companions ate of it, for stress of hunger, but my stomach revolted from it and I would not eat; and my refraining from it was, by Allah's favour, the cause of my being alive till now: for no sooner had my comrades tasted of it than their reason fled and their condition changed and they began to devour it like madmen possessed of an evil spirit. Then the savages gave them to drink of cocoa-nut oil and anointed them therewith; and straightway after drinking thereof, their eyes turned into their heads and they fell to eating greedily, against their wont. When I saw this, I was confounded and concerned for them, nor was I less anxious about myself, for fear of the naked folk. So I watched them narrowly, and it was not long before I discovered them to be a tribe of Magian cannibals whose King was a Ghul. All who came to their country or whoso they caught in their valleys or on their roads they brought to this King and fed them upon that food and anointed them with that oil, whereupon their stomachs dilated that they might eat largely, whilst their reason fled and they lost the power of thought and became idiots. Then they stuffed them with cocoa-nut oil and the aforesaid food, till they became fat and gross, when they slaughtered them by cutting their throats and roasted them for the King's eating; but, as for the savages themselves, they ate human flesh raw."

"One day they Liu Pei and Yüan-tê] sought shelter at a house whence a youth came out and made a low obeisance. They asked his name and he gave it as Liu An, of a well known family of hunters. Hearing who the visitor was the hunter wished to lay before him a dish of game, but though he sought for a long time nothing could be found for the table. So he came home, killed his wife and prepared a portion for his guest. While eating Liu Pei asked what flesh it was and the hunter told him "wolf". Yüan-tê knew no better and ate his fill. Next day at daylight, just as he was leaving, he went to the stables in the rear to get his horse and passing through the kitchen he saw the dead body of a woman lying on the table. The flesh of one arm had been cut away. Quite startled he asked what this meant, and then he knew what he had eaten the night before. He was deeply affected at this proof of his host's regard and the tears rained down as he mounted his steed at the gate."

"If you'll take my advice, you'll take off your armour, kneel before him in your shirt and call him your lord. Every day for supper he eats seven boys chopped up with pickle and spices on a silver dish, and he drinks spiced wine from Portugal by the gallon. Three sorrowful women turn his spits, and wait beside his bed in case he wants to have his way with them."

"His back was to the fire and he was warming his bare bottom, surrounded by unsavoury roasts and unseemly food, men and animals spitted together, a tub crammed full of children, some on spits that were being turned by the maidens."

"Why, there they are, both bakèd in that pie, Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred."

"I think there is more barbarism in eating men alive, then to feed upon them being dead; to mangle by tortures and torments a body full of lively sense, to roast him in pieces, and to make dogs and swine to gnaw and tear him... (as we have not only read, but seen very lately..., not amongst ancient enemies, but our neighbours and fellow-citizens; and which is worse, under pretence of piety and religion) then to roast and tear him after he is dead."

"The Cannibals and savage people do not so much offend me with roasting and eating of dead bodies, as those which torment and persecute the living."

"And of the cannibals that each other eat, The anthropophagi, ..."

"... The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and reliev'd, As thou my sometime daughter."

"If that the heavens do not their visible spirits Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses, It will come: Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep."

"I was surprised one morning early, with seeing no less than five canoes all on shore together, on my side the island, and the people who belonged to them all landed, and out of my sight.... I observed, by the help of my perspective glass, that they were no less than thirty in number; that they had a fire kindled, and that they had had meat dressed; how they cooked it, that I knew not, or what it was; but they were all dancing in I know not how many barbarous gestures and figures, their own way, round the fire. When I was thus looking on them, I perceived by my perspective two miserable wretches dragged from the boats, where, it seems, they were laid by, and were now brought out for the slaughter: I perceived one of them immediately fall, being knocked down, I suppose, with a club or wooden sword, for that was their way; and two or three others were at work immediately, cutting him open for their cookery, while the other victim was left standing by himself, till they should be ready for him. In that very moment this poor wretch, seeing himself a little at liberty, nature inspired him with hopes of life, and he started away from them, and ran with incredible swiftness along the sands, directly towards me, I mean towards that part of the coast where my habitation was."

"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout."

"A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter."

"As to our city of Dublin, shambles may be appointed for this purpose in the most convenient parts of it, and butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the children alive, and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs."

"Pigs, too frequent at our table... are no way comparable in taste or magnificence to a well grown, fat, yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at a lord mayor's feast, or any other publick entertainment."

"It's breakfast you want, is it?" says the great big tall woman, "it's breakfast you'll be if you don't move off from here. My man is an ogre and there's nothing he likes better than boys broiled on toast. You'd better be moving on or he'll soon be coming."

"... Ah! What's this I smell? Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he alive, or be he dead I'll have his bones to grind my bread." "Nonsense, dear," said his wife, "you're dreaming. Or perhaps you smell the scraps of that little boy you liked so much for yesterday's dinner...."

"The kīnaki or relish was to be provided by an unsuspecting pononga [slave], and this time Wehe did the honours himself. While some of the kai-rākau [warriors] watched, he silently walked up behind a female slave who was crouched over a large smooth stone making dough patties from pounded fernroot. Taking his patu [club] from his belt, Wehe struck her swiftly across the back of her skull, the blunt force he used ensuring a sharp, clean fracture. The woman slumped forward, her lank hair soon saturated with blood. Turning to the pononga's companions, Wehe bellowed, "If I catch anyone else stealing from the kūmara pits you can expect the same treatment. You two, pick her up and take her to the cooking area." The servants scurried over and collected the body.... Wehe and the kai-rākau watched as the two pononga laid the body on a large rock slab. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! The adze did its work and the head rolled away. The dogs, which had gathered instantly at the scent of blood, began licking the severed neck. The legs and arms were chopped off at the joins and two women skilfully boned the thighs before wrapping them in leaves and placing them in a basket, which was covered to stop flies getting at them.... Wehe's men observed with interest as the cook displayed his impressive butchering techniques using an obsidian knife and long-handled adze. The torso was quartered, the entrails removed and fed to the dogs, whose powerful jaws tore at them while their bushy tails wagged wildly.... "Back to work, men." Wehe clapped and the kai-rākau departed, leaving the cook's helpers washing the body parts in a stream of fresh water."

"Je ne me nourris que de chair humaine; j'espère que vous serez contens du régal que je compte vous en faire, et l'on a tué pour notre souper un jeune garçon de quinze ans, que je foutis hier, et qui doit être délicieux."

"Comme je mange ce que je fouts, cela m'évite la peine d'avoir un boucher."

"And when we have had enough of our little darling, we roast him alive on the spit and eat him with relish. "Oh, how mistaken they are", the Hungarian observed, "to disdain this meat, there's nothing more delicate nor better flavored in all the world, as the wise savages understand who have such a predilection for it." "That", said Voldomir, "is simply another of your European absurdities: after having erected murder into a crime you cut off your nose to spite your face and banished these dainties from your table; and the same overweening pride brought you to suppose that there was no wrong in butchering a pig for food, while there was nothing worse than performing the same operation upon a human being...""

"The old woman, although her behaviour was so kind, was a wicked witch, who lay in wait for children, and had built the little house on purpose to entice them. When they were once inside she used to kill them, cook them, and eat them, and then it was a feast day with her.... Early in the morning, before the children were awake, she got up to look at them, and as they lay sleeping so peacefully with round rosy cheeks, she said to herself, "What a fine feast I shall have!" Then she grasped Hansel with her withered hand, and led him into a little stable, and shut him up behind a grating; and call and scream as he might, it was no good. Then she went back to Grethel and shook her, crying, "Get up, lazy bones; fetch water, and cook something nice for your brother; he is outside in the stable, and must be fattened up. And when he is fat enough I will eat him." Grethel began to weep bitterly, but it was of no use, she had to do what the wicked witch bade her.... Each morning the old woman visited the little stable, and cried, "Hansel, stretch out your finger, that I may tell if you will soon be fat enough." Hansel, however, used to hold out a little bone, and the old woman, who had weak eyes, could not see what it was, and supposing it to be Hansel's finger, wondered very much that it was not getting fatter. When four weeks had passed and Hansel seemed to remain so thin, she lost patience and could wait no longer. "Now then, Grethel," cried she to the little girl; "be quick and draw water; be Hansel fat or be he lean, tomorrow I must kill and cook him." Oh what a grief for the poor little sister to have to fetch water, and how the tears flowed down over her cheeks! ... Early next morning Grethel had to get up, make the fire, and fill the kettle. "First we will do the baking," said the old woman; "I have heated the oven already, and kneaded the dough." She pushed poor Grethel towards the oven, out of which the flames were already shining. "Creep in," said the witch, "and see if it is properly hot, so that the bread may be baked." And Grethel once in, she meant to shut the door upon her and let her be baked, and then she would have eaten her."

"Then the mother took the little boy and chopped him in pieces, put him into the pot, and cooked him into stew. But Marlene stood by crying and crying, and all her tears fell into the pot, and they did not need any salt. Then the father came home, and sat down at the table and said, "Where is my son?" And the mother served up a large, large dish of stew, and Marlene cried and could not stop. Then the father said again, "Where is my son?" "Oh," said the mother, "he has gone across the country to his mother's great uncle. He will stay there awhile."... "Oh," said the man, "I am unhappy. It isn't right. He should have said good-bye to me." With that he began to eat, saying, "Marlene, why are you crying? Your brother will certainly come back." Then he said, "Wife, this food is delicious. Give me some more." And the more he ate the more he wanted, and he said, "Give me some more. You two shall have none of it. It seems to me as if it were all mine." And he ate and ate, throwing all the bones under the table, until he had finished it all."

"Then the bird flew away and lit on a goldsmith's house, and began to sing: My mother, she killed me, My father, he ate me, My sister Marlene, Gathered all my bones, Tied them in a silken scarf, Laid them beneath the juniper tree, Tweet, tweet, what a beautiful bird am I."

"He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back by Peters, when he fell instantly dead. I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued. Such things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality. Let it suffice to say that, having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands, feet, and head, throwing them together with the entrails, into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body, piecemeal, during the four ever memorable days of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of the month."

"How the waggish young lawyers' clerks laughed as they smacked their lips, and sucked in the golopshious gravy of the pies, which, by the by, appeared to be all delicious veal this time, and Mrs Lovett worked the handle of the machine all the more vigorously, that she was a little angry with the officious stranger. What an unusual trouble it seemed to be to wind up those forthcoming hundred pies! How she toiled, and how the people waited; but at length there came up the savoury steam, and then the tops of the pies were visible. They came up upon a large tray, about six feet square, and the moment Mrs Lovett ceased turning the handle, and let a catch fall that prevented the platform receding again, to the astonishment and terror of everyone, away flew all the pies, tray and all, across the counter, and a man, who was lying crouched down in an exceedingly flat state under the tray, sprang to his feet. Mrs Lovett shrieked, as well she might, and then she stood trembling, and looking as pale as death itself. It was the doomed cook from the cellars, who had adopted this mode of escape. The throngs of persons in the shop looked petrified, and after Mrs Lovett's shriek, there was an awful stillness for about a minute, and then the young man who officiated as cook spoke. "Ladies and Gentlemen — I fear that what I am going to say will spoil your appetites; but the truth is beautiful at all times, and I have to state that Mrs Lovett's pies are made of human flesh!" How the throng of persons recoiled — what a roar of agony and dismay there was! How frightfully sick about forty lawyers' clerks became all at once, and how they spat out the gelatinous clinging portions of the rich pies they had been devouring. "Good gracious! — oh, the pies! — confound it!""

"Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras."

"I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized."

"Tararo having thrown away his surf-board, entered into an animated conversation with Bill, pointing frequently during the course of it to me; whereby I concluded he must be telling him about the memorable battle, and the part we had taken in it. When he paused, I begged of Bill to ask him about the woman Avatea, for I had some hope that she might have come with Tararo on this visit. "And ask him", said I, "who she is, for I am persuaded she is of a different race from the Feejeeans." On the mention of her name the chief frowned darkly, and seemed to speak with much anger."You're right, Ralph", said Bill, when the chief had ceased to talk; "she's not a Feejee girl, but a Samoan. How she ever came to this place the chief does not very clearly explain, but he says she was taken in war, and that he got her three years ago, an' kept her as his daughter ever since. Lucky for her, poor girl, else she'd have been roasted and eaten like the rest.""But why does Tararo frown and look so angry?" said I."Because the girl's somewhat obstinate, like most o' the sex, an' won't marry the man he wants her to. It seems that a chief of some other island came on a visit to Tararo and took a fancy to her, but she wouldn't have him on no account, bein' already in love, and engaged to a young chief whom Tararo hates, and she kicked up a desperate shindy; so, as he was going on a war expedition in his canoe, he left her to think about it, sayin' he'd be back in six months or so, when he hoped she wouldn't be so obstropolous. This happened just a week ago; an' Tararo says that if she's not ready to go, when the chief returns, as his bride, she'll be sent to him as a long pig.""As a long pig!" I exclaimed in surprise; "why what does he mean by that?""He means somethin' very unpleasant", answered Bill with a frown. "You see these blackguards eat men an' women just as readily as they eat pigs; and, as baked pigs and baked men are very like each other in appearance, they call men long pigs. If Avatea goes to this fellow as a long pig, it's all up with her, poor thing.""

"Captain Murderer's mission was matrimony, and the gratification of a cannibal appetite with tender brides. On his marriage morning, he always caused both sides of the way to church to be planted with curious flowers; and when his bride said, "Dear Captain Murderer, I ever saw flowers like these before: what are they called?" he answered, "They are called Garnish for house-lamb", and laughed at his ferocious practical joke in a horrid manner, disquieting the minds of the noble bridal company, with a very sharp show of teeth, then displayed for the first time. He made love in a coach and six, and married in a coach and twelve, and all his horses were milk-white horses with one red spot on the back which he caused to be hidden by the harness. For, the spot would come there, though every horse was milk-white when Captain Murderer bought him. And the spot was young bride's blood."

"The Captain brought out a silver pie-dish of immense capacity, and the Captain brought out flour and butter and eggs and all things needful, except the inside of the pie; of materials for the staple of the pie itself, the Captain brought out none. Then said the lovely bride, "Dear Captain Murderer, what pie is this to be?" He replied, "A meat pie." Then said the lovely bride, "Dear Captain Murderer, I see no meat." The Captain humorously retorted, "Look in the glass." She looked in the glass, but still she saw no meat, and then the Captain roared with laughter, and suddenly frowning and drawing his sword, bade her roll out the crust. So she rolled out the crust, dropping large tears upon it all the time because he was so cross, and when she had lined the dish with crust and had cut the crust all ready to fit the top, the Captain called out, "I see the meat in the glass!" And the bride looked up at the glass, just in time to see the Captain cutting her head off; and he chopped her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted her, and put her in the pie, and sent it to the baker's, and ate it all, and picked the bones."

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains And the women come out to cut up what remains Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."

", n. A gastronome of the old school who preserves the simple tastes and adheres to the natural diet of the pre-pork period. The practice of cannibalism was once universal, as the smallest knowledge of philology will serve to show. "Oblige us", says the erudite author of the Delectatio Demonorum, "by considering the derivation of the word 'sarcophagus', and see if it be not suggestive of potted meats. Observe the significance of the phrase 'sweet sixteen'. What a world of meaning lurks in the expression 'she's as sweet as a peach', and how suggestive of luncheon are the words 'tender youth!' A kiss is but a modified bite, and a fond mother, when she rapturously avers that her babe is 'almost good enough to eat', merely shows that she is herself only a trifle too good to eat it.""

"Tublat, whom he had hated and who had hated him, he had killed in a fair fight, and yet never had the thought of eating Tublat's flesh entered his head. It would have been as revolting to him as is cannibalism to us."

"In ancient times, as I recollect, people often ate human beings, but I am rather hazy about it. I tried to look this up, but my history has no chronology, and scrawled all over each page are the words: "Virtue and Morality". Since I could not sleep anyway, I read intently half the night, until I began to see words between the lines, the whole book being filled with the two words – "Eat people"."

"Among the anthropophagi One's friends are one's sarcophagi."

"I don't trust you little swine. You've no guts outside your own sties. But for us you'd all have run away. We are the fighting Uruk-hai! We slew the great warrior. We took the prisoners. We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand: the Hand that gives us man's-flesh to eat. We came out of Isengard, and led you here, and we shall lead you back by the way we choose. I am Uglúk. I have spoken." "You have spoken more than enough, Uglúk," sneered the evil voice.... "Swine is it? How do you folk like being called swine by the muck-rakers of a dirty little wizard? It's orc-flesh they eat, I'll warrant."

""But if you eat this chap who's God", said Llewelyn stoutly, "how can it be horrible? If it's all right to eat God why is it horrible to eat Jim Whittle?""Because", said Dymphna reasonably, "if you eat God there's always plenty left. You can't eat God up because God just goes on and on and on and God can't ever be finished. You silly clot", she added and then went on cutting holly leaves."

"... Now, in my opinion, you can't find a nicer piece of meat, marbled but firm, than a buck [boy] tempered [castrated] not older than six, then hung at twice that age." "No one asked your opinion", Memtok answered. "Their Charity's opinion is the only one that counts. They think that sluts [young women] are more tender."

"Hugh tried to keep his eyes [off] the contents of the meat storage room. Most of the meat was beef and fowl. But one long row of hooks down the center held what he knew he would find – human carcasses, gutted and cleaned and frozen, hanging head down, save that the heads were missing. Young sluts and bucks, he could see, but whether the bucks were tempered or not was no longer evident.... Memtok paused on the way out and patted the loin of a stripling buck carcass. "That's what I would call a nice piece of meat. Eh, Hugh?""

"I despised him long before I found out about his having young girls butchered and served for his dinner.... Ponse always ate girls. About one a day for his family table, I gathered. Girls about the age and plumpness of [14-year-old] Kitten." "But— But— Hugh, I ate the same thing he did, lots of times. I must have— I must have—" "Sure you did. So did I. But not after I knew. Nor did you." "Honey... you better stop the car. I'm going to be sick."

"The ocean's dying. Plankton's dying. It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing, they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!"

"Soylent Green is people!"

"We're gonna be french fries! Human french fries!"

"Mother and father of appetites, I am Sagawa, who'll kiss you, for starters."

"The harvest had yielded no grain. Gradually, even tree bark and plant stalks had grown scarce. Soon, markets selling human flesh had begun to appear... The two men were tearing off the little girl's clothes... The girl looked like she was somewhere around ten years of age... It soon became evident that most of the customers were interested in the little girl, because many complained that the older woman's flesh was no longer quite so fresh as the girl's... [Stabbed in the chest with a knife, t]he little girl gasped. Her screams gave way to a lingering sigh... He... rapidly sliced apart her body with the help of the cashier before handing the pieces one by one to the people waiting outside the shed... The little girl had already been completely dismembered, and the proprietor was leading the woman from the corner of the shack over to the stump. Not daring to watch any more, Willow turned and made his way down an alley. But he was pursued by the dull sound of the proprietor's ax cutting into the woman's flesh, by the woman's lacerating shriek. He shook uncontrollably, and it was only when he had rushed out of the alley and into another part of town that the sounds began to recede behind him. But, try as he might, he was unable to expel the scene he had just witnessed from his mind."

"A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone."

"A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. [Slurps]"

""Let Comrade Ding eat something before he takes a rest." "There's still one more important dish!" "Oh", Diamond Jin said thoughtfully. "Then bring it in." A red serving girl removed the cactus plant in the middle of the table. Then two red serving girls entered carrying a large round gilded platter in which sat a golden, incredibly fragrant little boy."

"The boy sat cross-legged in the middle of the gilded platter, golden brown and oozing sweet-smelling oil, a giddy smile frozen on his face. Lovely, naive. Around him was spread a garland of green vegetable leaves and bright red radish blossoms. The stupefied investigator swallowed back the juices that rumbled up from his stomach as he gawked at the boy. A pair of limpid eyes gazed back at him, steam puffed out of the boy's nostrils, and the lips quivered as if he were about to speak.... The investigator thought he must be dreaming. He opened his eyes to survey the scene; the boy was still sitting cross-legged on the platter. "After you, Comrade Ding, old fellow", Diamond Jin said. "This is a famous dish in these parts", the Party Secretary and Mine Director said. "... It's a dish they won't forget for as long as they live, one that has drawn nothing but praise. We've earned a lot of convertible currency for the nation by serving it to our most honored guests. Such as yourself, sir." ... The boy exuded a powerful, irresistible fragrance."

"She first stressed that a chef's heart is made of steel and that a chef should never waste emotions. Rather than being human, the babies we are about to slaughter and cook are small animals in human form that are, based upon strict, mutual agreement, produced to meet the special needs of Liquorland's developing economy and prosperity. In essence, they are no different than the platypuses swimming in the tank waiting to be slaughtered."

"Five minutes later, two young women in snowy white hospital gowns and square caps carried a naked meat boy into the lecture hall in a specially designed gurney. The women ... set the gurney on the chopping block, then stepped aside, their arms hanging down stiffly. My mother-in-law bent over to inspect the pink meat boy, poked him in the chest with a soft, dainty index finger, and nodded with satisfaction."

"My mother-in-law said, The meat boy's blood will be completely drained in about an hour and a half. The second step is to remove the innards while keeping them intact. The third step is to loosen the hair with water heated to 70 degrees... I really don't feel like describing my mother-in-law’s actual cooking lesson, which was boring and nauseating at the same time."

"Nastya was left standing naked in the middle of the courtyard. Savely crossed himself, spat into his palms, took hold of the shovel's iron handle, grunted, picked it up, staggered over to the oven, and, almost at a run, pushed Nastya into the oven with a single movement. Her body erupted into orange light. Here we are! It's begun! Nastya managed to think, looking at the slightly sooty ceiling of the new oven. Then she felt the heat. It overwhelmed her like a frightening, red bear and called forth a wild, inhuman scream from her lungs."

"The skin on Nastya's neck and shoulders tightened and soon blisters began to flow over her body like drops of water. Nastya wriggled around and, though the chains had less and less of her to hold onto, they still held fast. Her head jerked very slightly, and her face turned into one gigantic, red mouth. A scream tore itself loose from her in an invisible, crimson stream. "You need to poke the coals, Sergei Arkadeyevich ... so that her rind catches ..." Savely licked the sweat from his upper lip."

""Don't dare overcook my daughter!" "I know what I'm doing .... She'll be done in three hours," Savely wiped the sweat from his brow."

"Nastya was brought to the table toward seven o'clock.... Golden-brown, she was presented on an oval serving dish, clutching at her legs with now blackened fingernails. White rose buds were scattered around her, slices of lemon covered her chest, knees, and shoulders. White river lilies bloomed innocently on her breasts, pubis, and forehead. "That's my daughter!" Sablin stood up, glass in hand. "Tonight's special, ladies and gentlemen!" Everyone applauded."

"[Nastya's mother] Sablina stood up, walked over to the serving dish, stuck the two-pronged fork into Nastya's left breast, and began to cut into her flesh. Everyone listened carefully. Under a brown, crispy crust flashed white meat and a yellow strip of fat. Her juice flowed freely. Sablina put a slice of breast onto a plate and handed it to her husband. "Please, everyone! Don't be shy!""

"Once she came home troubled: "Bold, they say that northerners here go to restaurants that serve human flesh. 'Two-legged mutton', have you heard that? Different names for old men, women, young girls, children? Are they really such monsters up there?" "I don't think so," Bold said. "I never met any." She was not entirely reassured. She often saw hungry ghosts in her sleep, and they had to come from somewhere. And they sometimes complained to her of having had their bodies eaten. It made sense to her that they might cluster around restaurants in search of some kind of retribution. Bold nodded; it made sense to him too, though it was hard to believe the teeming city harbored practicing cannibals when there was so much other food to be had."

"But if you're gonna dine with them cannibals Sooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten."

"The boy lay with his head in the man's lap. After a while he said: They're going to kill those people, arent they? Yes. Why do they have to do that? I dont know. Are they going to eat them? I dont know. They're going to eat them, arent they? Yes. And we couldnt help them because then they'd eat us too. Yes. And that's why we couldnt help them. Yes. Okay."

"They'd taken everything with them except whatever black thing was skewered over the coals. He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him. He looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is it? The boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding him close. I'm sorry, he whispered. I'm sorry."

"He lies down in the hammock and tries to sleep. A commercial plays again and again in his mind. A woman who's beautiful but dressed conservatively is putting dinner on the table for her three children and husband. She looks at the camera and says: "I serve my family special food, it's the same meat as always, but tastier." The whole family smiles and eats their dinner. The government, his government, decided to resignify the product. They gave human meat the name "special meat". Instead of just "meat", now there's "special tenderloin", "special cutlets", "special kidneys". He doesn't call it special meat. He uses technical words to refer to what is a human but will never be a person, to what is always a product. To the number of heads to be processed, to the lot waiting in the unloading yard, to the slaughter line that must run in a constant and orderly manner, to the excrement that needs to be sold for manure, to the offal sector. No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food."

"The smell of barbecue is in the air. They go to the rest area, where the farmhands are roasting a rack of meat on a cross. El Gringo explains to Egmont that they've been preparing it since eight in the morning, "So it melts in your mouth", and that the guys are actually about to eat a kid. "It's the most tender kind of meat, there's only just a little, because a kid doesn't weigh as much as a calf. We're celebrating because one of them became a father", he explains. "Want a sandwich?""

"Over the years, the shop transformed, gradually but persistently. First it was the packaged hands that Spanel placed off to the side where they were hidden among the milanesas à la provençale, the cuts of tri-tip and the kidneys. The label read "Special Meat", but on another part of the package, Spanel clarified that it was "Upper Extremity", strategically avoiding the word hand. Then she added packaged feet, which were displayed on a bed of lettuce with the label "Lower Extremity", and later on, a platter with tongues, penises, noses, testicles and a sign that said "Spanel's Delicacies". Before long, people began to ask for front or hind trotters, using the cuts of pork to refer to upper and lower extremities. The industry took this as permission and started to label products with these euphemisms that nullified all horror."

"The Ghoul: (while starting to dismember a man he has just killed) Well, Lucy MacLean, it ain't all canned peaches and marmalade left up here, sweetheart. Sometimes a fella's got to eat a fella. Lucy: You know, my vault has endured hardship, too. In the Great Plague of '77, everyone had to quarantine, they couldn't work the farms together. People starved. My mother included. My dad dropped to 128 pounds, and he still refused to do anything like this. (The Ghoul laughs) What? What's so funny? The Ghoul: Well, there's what people say they did and what they really did. I'll bet your daddy was first in line at the cookout. I bet he had a bib with a drawing of his neighbor's ass on there. Lucy: How do you live like this?! Why keep going?! The Ghoul: Well, one good question deserves another. Why the fuck am I doing all the work? Now come on, vaultie. Ass jerky don't make itself."

"From around 1600 to 1750, the Baroque period witnessed the creation of some of the greatest musical masterpieces ever composed."

"For the majority of readers, Latin American fantastic literature operates under the tutelage of the great masters: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. However, although few are acquainted with their works, many women began experimenting with this genre well before their male counterparts and were the true precursors of the form, though their names remained on the shelves of oblivion, without the recognition that they deserved. María Luisa Bombal, for example, wrote the fantastic nouvelle, House of Mist (1937) before the famous Ficciones (1944) of Borges, and the Mexican, Elena Garro, wrote Remembrance of Things to Come (1962) before the publication of García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)."

"The present generation has this ingrained weakness, that it thinks that nothing discovered by the moderns is worthy to be received—the result of this is that if I wanted to publish anything of my own invention I should attribute it to someone else, and say, “Someone else said this, not I.” Therefore (that I may not wholly be robbed of a hearing) it was a certain great man that discovered all my ideas, not I."

"The very best proof of how much writing mattered was the forgeries. Forgery had been an ecclesiastical habit for centuries. ... faking had become a monastic speciality. The monks persisted. They were the archivists, the keepers of records, and they were quite prepared to improve on history to keep the record straight. The more respect for the written word, the more fakes."

"Such forgeries were common enough... So unenviable was the reputation that priests had acquired in this matter that Isaac Newton spent 50 years of his life trying to undo the forgeries that he thought various priests had incorporated into the Bible, to serve their temporal ends. And the only answer to his scholarly and voluminous accusations was to hide them for some 250 years—in fact they still remain secret."

"People who read tend to commit fewer s, I guess. I think that one of the reasons for that isn’t just that they’re brighter, but I think books give you a place to go. They give you a time-out. They give you a different headspace to be in, rather than getting more and more frustrated or angry or upset or whatever it is that leads people to these outbursts. So I think that books provide a social service that way, for their readers, that isn’t recognized in your basic literature course. Escapist literature gets a bad rap, but I think escape is pretty important for a lot of people in a lot of places."

"Though fairy-stories are of course by no means the only medium of Escape, they are today one of the most obvious and (to some) outrageous forms of 'escapist literature' ..."

"Real life is overrated. But as readers we can escape to any elsewhere our heart desires – and at present all my heart wants is hope and kindness and liberty and pure escapism."

"When the seas of life get rough, some readers look for escape, while others dive right in. So it is , when many book lovers are turning toward ."