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

LelaRentaka7

“I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.”
― P.G. Wodehouse

LelaRentaka7

“Sometimes a book isn't a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
Sometimes it's the only story you knew how to tell.”
― Tahereh Mafi

bianglala

“Writing is a lifelong disease. Once contracted, the only prescription is to write constantly in whatever form to express your condition, in whatever construction to carry your words beyond you.”

- J.R. Tompkins

bianglala

“Words rich in meaning can be cheap in sound effects.”

- Dejan Stojanovic

bianglala

“The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.”

-John Green

bianglala

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”

-Virginia Woolf -

bianglala

“Sometimes I reread my favorite books from back to front. I start with the last chapter and read backward until I get to the beginning. When you read this way, characters go from hope to despair, from self-knowledge to doubt. In love stories, couples start out as lovers and end as strangers. Coming-of-age books become stories of losing your way. Your favorite characters come back to life.”

- Nicola Yoon -

bianglala

“I have good reason to be content,
for thank God I can read and
perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.”

- John Keats -

bianglala

“Reading... a vacation for the mind....”

- Dave Barry -

bianglala

“I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.”

- Naomi Shihab Nye -

bianglala

“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.”

- Jane Yolen, Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood -

bianglala

“I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.”

- George Gissing -

bianglala

“Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.”

- Jonathan Stroud -

bianglala

“Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.”

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World -

bianglala

“As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body.”

- Marcel Proust -

bianglala

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.”

- George R.R. Martin -

bianglala

“Replace your old books with the book you've always wanted to write.”

- Rob Bignell -

bianglala

“Thousands of years ago, there were no writers; just storytellers. I would love to be a storyteller but I am just a writer. I don’t appeal to the ears; I appeal to the mind.”

- King Samuel Benson -

LelaRentaka7

“I need you because I know I deserve you but let me fall in love with you one last time before I let go. So I can remember the beautiful imperfection that rattled my bones.”
― Robert M. Drake

LelaRentaka7

“To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me--the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.”
― Charlotte Brontë