“Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 227 of 303
“Genre is a useful concept only when used not evaluatively but descriptively.”
“You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, "Am I popular?" I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.”
“Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.”
“If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself”
“All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.”
“Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.”
“We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.”
“The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.”
“Those who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don't like either hobbits, or quasars; they don't feel at home with them; they don't want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I'll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one”
“There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.”
“Do remember, though, that unless you're a playwright, the result [dialogue] isn't what you want; it's only an element of what you want. Actors embody and re-create the words of drama. In fiction, a tremendous amount of story and character may be given through the dialogue, but the story-world and its people have to be created by the storyteller. If there's nothing in it but disembodied voices, too much is missing.”
“In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.”
“The label YA actually means nothing except that the protagonists, or some of them, are young. Publishers like it because it is a secure marketing niche. But the cost of security is exclusion from literary consideration.”
“Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith The army of unalterable law.”
“My mind may be American but my heart is British.”
“A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.”
“Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.”
“the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes”
“Turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod goodbye to Rochefoucauld, If the street were time and he as the end of the street.”