Asides
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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.
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Beautiful sentences
Let the schools of literary criticism, rapacious fingerlings, resort to the facts of the author’s life before they can interpret the text. Nadine Gordimer, “The Empire of Joseph Roth.”
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Beautiful sentences
When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that…
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Beautiful sentences
All English stories get bogged down in whether or not the furniture is socially and aesthetically acceptable. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
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Beautiful sentences
At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret? Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins
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Beautiful sentences
My imagination failed. I got all enmeshed in what was realism and what was reality and what was true—my need not be int that place—and my imagination failed. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
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Beautiful sentences
But aren’t all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos—we know what’s out there. It’s what isn’t that truly compels us. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet lags—four states and twelve hundred miles traversed…