...Quotes on Reading, Writing @ Literature...

arinn

arinn

arinn

                                “To be better equipped for the tests that the year will bring — read a textbook. To prepare for the tests that life will bring — read a book.”  
  ―    Mokokoma Mokhonoana




                                “It appeared clear to me - partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks - that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty. Defiance seemed the only dignified response to the adult world.”  
  ―    Timothy B. Tyson,          Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story   

arinn

arinn

I was a bookman; I had always been a bookman. From adolescence books had been one of my passions. Books not merely — and perhaps not chiefly — as vehicles of learning or knowledge, but books as books, books as entities, books as beautiful things, books as historical antiquities, books as repositories of memorable associations. Questions of type, ink, paper, margins, watermarks, paginations, bindings, were capable of really agitating me. I was too sensitive and catholic a lover a books to be a scholar in the strict modern meaning of the term. My magnum opus was not a work of scholarship, and even such scholarship as it comprised had been attained by a labor hateful to me. I would inhale the scholarship of others as a sweet smell. I would gather it like honey, but eclectically, never exhausting one flower before trying the next. My knowledge was, perhaps, considerable, but it was unorganized. And my principal claim to consideration was that I could wander in any demesne of culture without having the awkward air of a stranger. In brief, I was comprehensively bookish. ~Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), The Glimpse: An Adventure of the Soul, 1909

arinn

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”  

arinn

“A book, too, can be a star, ‘explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,’ a
living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”

-Madeleine L’Engle

arinn

“The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, nor defense.”

- J.A. Langford

arinn

“A first book has some of the sweetness of a first love.”
- Robert Aris Willmott

seribulan

      “Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.”  
  ―    Jim Morrison

seribulan

      “I opened a book and in I strode.
Now nobody can find me.
I've left my chair, my house, my road,
My town and my world behind me.
I'm wearing the cloak, I've slipped on the ring,
I've swallowed the magic potion.
I've fought with a dragon, dined with a king
And dived in a bottomless ocean.
I opened a book and made some friends.
I shared their tears and laughter
And followed their road with its bumps and bends
To the happily ever after.
I finished my book and out I came.
The cloak can no longer hide me.
My chair and my house are just the same,
But I have a book inside me.”  
  ―    Julia Donaldson

seribulan

      “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”  
  ―    Robert Frost

seribulan

      “Always be a poet, even in prose.”  
  ―    Charles Baudelaire

seribulan

      “Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.”  
  ―    Charles Bukowski

arinn

seribulan

      “No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many.”  
  ―    Thomas Lux

seribulan

      “To be a poet is to place pleasure, beauty and sensual delights front and centre, it means having a predilection for debauchery.”  
  ―    Nicole Brossard

seribulan

      “For if my poems have always been about survival--and I believe they have been--then survival too keeps revealing itself as an art of the unexpected.”  
  ―    Jane Cooper

seribulan

      “ Great is the hand that holds dominion over/Man by a scribbled name.”  
  ―    Dylan Thomas

seribulan

“. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.”  
  ―    Major Jackson