Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent...

Sence and Sensibility, for instance, came out in three separate volumes, as did Pride and Prejudice (so the next time you read one of the ubiquitous time-travel Austen adaptations and somebody picks up a single-volume...

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?” asked Mrs. Dodypol. “It depends,” says I, “how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.

To sense the peace of extinguished passionHappiness in not knowing the ultimate knowledge

Dreams are our only geography—our native land.

They are both spectacular, Life and death.

I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings, and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of ‘deconstruction’ or ‘postmodernism’ was applied...

In every sound, the hidden silence sleeps.

No reason for a feverish rush For we will all arrive in the same place At the right time. Justice will be served. There will be no better or worse, No big and small, no...

Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time.

Faith is a question of eyesight; even the blind can see that.

How does one say something new and not retell?

Kanuni za fasihi ndiyo msingi wa maandiko yote ya kitaalamu hapa ulimwenguni. Watu hawana budi kuzifuata kanuni hizo kama wanataka kutumia vipaji vyao katika ngazi ya kimataifa.

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then...

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy or sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us...

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as...

En el muro de Facebook hay una opción que te permite añadir “Me gusta” al comentario o la foto de otro internauta. El pictograma es una mano cerrada con el pulgar hacia arriba. También ofrece...

We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.

If you’re going to fall in love with anyone, fall in love with a writer. Allow yourself to become immortalised in words.

The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us...

There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called “ordinary”...

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

I can Control F to find words and phrases lost in a sea of literature, but why can’t I Control F to find one object among a hoarder’s clutter?

…but don’t tell me I’m not sensitive to beauty. That’s my Achilles’ heel, and don’t you forget it. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset and I’m limp, by God…

Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search...

Beneath beautiful appearances I search out ugly depths, and beneath ignoble surfaces I probe for the hidden mines of devotion and virtue. It’s a relatively benign mania, which enables you to see something new in...

How to explain the sheer tingling joy one experiences when two interesting, complex, and occasionally aggravating characters have at last settled their misunderstandings and will live happily ever after, no matter what travails life might...

I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken – and I’d...

Science has discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: ‘all meanings depend on the...

We work all our lives to be who we become. And, it’s who we become that determines what becomes of us.

In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape...

The rich don’t have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don’t do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody’s happy.

You stand for what is right-for the patient and the staff.Pressures of work may down you,maybe bent but not broken.

Actually, I am a coward. I say only what is safe to say, and I criticise only what is permissable to criticise.

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time...

And on top of that, my dad is a professor of literature so he’s very, very smart. So I was always thinking, ‘How I can aspire to be him?’ There was this intimidating aura growing...

Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.

He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.

In French culture, the best way of buying time or getting off the hook entirely in a thorny personal situation is to claim that it’s complicated. The French did not invent love, but they did...

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

I’m interested in things women do that aren’t spoken about. Manto’s stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I’ve no regrets.

I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the...

When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking about one sub-genre of fantastic literature. They are talking about Tolkien, and Tolkien’s innumerable heirs. Call it ‘epic’, or ‘high’, or ‘genre’...

Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in...