Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.... You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. Y...ou bring your history and you read it in your own terms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plasti...c and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt to themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that ...is already alive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If Shakespeare has a singularity, it is because he has become a black hole. Light, insight, intelligence, matter--all pour ceasele...ssly into him, as critics are drawn into the densening vortex of his reputation; they add their own weight to his increasing mass. The light from other stars--other poets, other dramatists--is wrenched and bent as it passes by him on its way to us. He warps cultural space-time; he distorts our view of the universe around him. As Emerson said, "Now, literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakespearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which at present we do not see." But Shakespeare himself no longer transmits visible light; his stellar energies have been trapped within the gravity well of his own reputation. We find in Shakespeare only what we bring to him or what others have left behind; he gives us back our own values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless rich...es of Christ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I happen to feel that the degree of a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can b...ring to bear on the same topic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has potency. So I work to te...ll the truth about people's lives; I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block, who've been waiting in the wings, characters we thought we had to ignore because they weren't pimp-flashy or hustler-slick or because they didn't fit easily into previously acceptable modes or stock types. I want to lift up some usable truths ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking--and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a ...way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. I...t accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »