Category: writing
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A year of rejections
At this stage of my life, I’ve been submitting stories for publication for seven years. It’s interesting to see the results of these years in handy graph form. The aqua section of the graph has been steadily widening with time. Last year it got to 19% and this year it edged up to 20%. And…
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Beautiful Sentences
This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty—this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
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Beautiful sentences
All around him Death was circling, circling and mowing. Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March
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Beautiful sentences
But the fact now seemed to be that the aging lover no longer wished to be disenchanted, that the intoxication was too precious to him. Who shall unravel the mystery of an artist’s nature and character! Who shall explain the profound instinctual fusion of discipline and dissoluteness on which it rests! Thomas Mann, Death in…
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Beautiful sentences
The young man was rebaptizing her, she was a child—and as fresh as her name. Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March.
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Beautiful sentences
For a significant intellectual product to make a broad and deep immediate appeal, there must be a hidden affinity, indeed a congruence, between the personal destiny of the author and the wider destiny of his generation. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.
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Beautiful sentences
When we try to translate truth out of one sphere into another, whether from life into books or from books into lectures, something happens to truth, it goes wrong, not suddenly when it might be detected, but slowly. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel.
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Beautiful sentences
Literature isn’t a profession at all. I’ll have you know—it is a curse. And when do we first discover that this curse has come upon us? At a terrible early age. An age when by rights one should still be living at peace and harmony with God and the world. You begin to feel that…
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Beautiful Sentences
Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the west. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel.