Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.
Good fiction is made of what is real, and reality is difficult to come by.
—Ralph Ellison
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories
—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (via justanotherquoteblog)
(via booklover)
I do not think of all the misery, but of the glory that remains. Go outside into the fields, nature and the sun, go out and seek happiness in yourself and in God. Think of the beauty that again and again discharges itself within and without you and be happy.
—
May We Be Forgiven: A Novel
A.M. Homes
Danger gleams like sunshine to a brave man’s eyes.
—Euripides (via eulum)
(Source: jaded-mandarin, via astrowomyn)
UFARATZA: c/o louise erdrich
Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs at the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
…
What interests me about the relationship between language/representation and the body is that the threshold is extremely telling. One of the most corporeal texts ever written was Walt Whitmanâs Leaves of Grass. That interests me. The acute embodiment of his language, how a reader feels more inside her own body in his poetics. It interests me that what I think of as acutely corporeal writing is on the decline in our present tense. Why is that I wonder. In its place we have a large swath of some quasi-domestic realism going on. Middle-aged people having sex or not having it, getting divorced or married or producing offspring or taking care of aging parents or going through endlessly bourgeois plot lines, particularly white heterosexual bourgeois plot lines. The most exciting work to me today is work that deviates via corporeal truths and plot lines. What interests me about the relationship between language/representation and the body is that the threshold is extremely telling.
— Lidia Yuknavitch in An ABR Interview withJeffrey A. Sartain
We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.
—Mario Vargas Llosa (via wordpainting)
(via booklover)
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience. The lady that only read books that improved her mind was taking a safe course—and a hopeless one. She’ll never know whether her mind is improved or not, but should she ever, by some mistake, read a great novel, she’ll know mighty well that something is happening to her.
—Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (with thanks to settledthingsstrange and habitofbeing)
(via booklover)
