A Literary Revolution

aseaofquotes:

Frances O’Roark Dowell, Where I’d Like To Be

Submitted by stripperwithaheartofgold.

(via tywinning)

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods disperse suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez’s, Love in the Time of Cholera

(via crazylifeofa)

(via teachingliteracy)

Francois Truffaut said that for a director it was an inspiring sight to walk to the front of a movie theater, turn around, and look back at the faces of the audience, turned up to the light from the screen. If the film is any good, those faces reflect an out-of-the-body experience: The audience for a brief time is somewhere else, sometime else, concerned with lives that are not its own. Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.
Robert Ebert’s introduction to The Great Movies (Book I).

So Janie began to think of Death. Death, that strange being with the huge square toes who lived way in the West. The great one who lived in the straight house like a platform without sides to it, and without a roof. What need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him? He stands in his high house that overlooks the world. Stands watchful and motionless all day with his sword drawn back, waiting for the messenger to bid him come. Been standing there before there was a where or a when or a then. She was liable to find a feather from his wings lying in her yard any day now.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus.

What a large number of factors constitute a single human being! How very many layers we operate on, and how very many influences we receive from our minds, our bodies, our histories, our families, our cities, our souls and our lunches!
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love.

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor.

Why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want.
Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

(Source: distincts, via funeral)

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long gabled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.
William Faulkner’s Light In August. Welcome to Faulkner…

rss
archive