All that is active, all that is enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might be described as an abstract, ideal and abs...olute impermeability.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Watt's concern, deep as it appeared, was not after all what the figure was, in reality, but with what the figure appeared to be, i...n reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And yet, and yet ... Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are obvious acts of despera...tion and secret consolation. Our fate (unlike the hell of Swedenborg or the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad. Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaite...d him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to wha...t? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of w...hich history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rise. Let us combine. There are no magics or elves... Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must Wizard a track through our own screaming weed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When young people are too rigidly sequestered from [the world], their lively and romantic imaginations paint it to them as a parad...ise of which they have been beguiled; but when they are shown it properly, and in due time, they see it such as it really is, equally shared by pain and pleasure, hope and disappointment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »