"We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.” That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?"
#Dead Poets Society
#lit
#quotes
"Some one said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know."
T. S. Eliot, from “Tradition and the Individual” (via proustitute)
#T.S. Eliot
#poetry
#lit
#prose
#criticism
#writing
#tradition
#knowledge
"But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence."
Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night (via excessivebookshelf)
#Alberto Manguel
#books
#library
#lit
#night
#reading
"What people read revealed so much about them that she considered our card catalog a treasure house of privileged secrets; each card contained the map of an individual’s soul."
Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen (via thebookishdark)
#lit
#Alice Hoffman
#reading
#card catalog
#secrets
#soul
(Source: betweenwordsandworlds, via bookoasis-deactivated20120227)
"I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation."
Robert Frost, Conversations on the Craft of Poetry (via bookoasis)
#lit
#poetry
#Robert Frost
#prose
#verse
#translation
"The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared."
Lois Lowry, The Giver (via bookoasis)
#lit
#Lois Lowry
#The Giver
#memories
#pain
#loneliness
#sharing
"You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift."
Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus (via whylovememylove)
#Morgenstern
#The Night Circus
#Prose
#Lit
#Writing
#Tale
#Soul
#Gift
"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."
Charles Péguy (via wwnorton)
#Charles Péguy
#lit
#prose
#words
#writing
#writers
(via proustitute)
"Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it."
Mark Twain (via libraryland)
#Mark Twain
#censorship
#banned books week
#lit
#quote
(via ithoughtyousaidgoforit)
T. S. Eliot’s manuscript of The Waste Land.
(via anticipatedstranger)
"I’d woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist."
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (via bookoasis)
#lit
#Fernando Pessoa
#morning
#exist
#story of my life
"There’s a code in the simplest conversation that tells speakers what’s going on outside the bare acoustics. This was missing when they talked. There was a missing beat. It was hard for her to find the tempo. All they had were unadjusted words."
From “The Body Artist” by Don DeLillo. (via bookoflead)
#acoustics
#codes
#don delillo
#speech
#the body artist
#lit
#novella
"There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that’s the time for sex."
H. G. Wells, as cited in Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (via bookoasis)
#lit
#H. G. Wells
#writing
#boredom
#sex
#TMI
These are my people.
Sylvia Beach, Ernest Hemingway and other friends outside Shakespeare & Co.
“On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive.” — Ernest Hemingway, “Shakespeare and Company,” A Moveable Feast
(Source: bookmania)
