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"That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us."
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"I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them."
Society
"You all right?" he said again.I didn't love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn't belong here. But he existed, he deserved to be alive. I was wishing I could tell him how to change so he could get there, the place where I was."Yes," I said. I touched him on the arm with my hand. My hand touched his arm. Hand touched arm. Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole."
Romance
"But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman."
Self
"Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow."
Philosophy
"By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them.Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.These are worth it. These are what I have come for."
Life
"I wish I didn't have to think about you. You wanted to impress me; well, I'm not impressed, I'm disgusted...You wanted to make damn good and sure I'd never be able to turn over in bed again without feeling that body beside me, not there but tangible, like a leg that's been cut off. Gone but the place still hurts."
Emotion
"The Chorus Line:A Rope-Jumping Rhymewe are the maidsthe ones you killedthe ones you failedwe danced in airour bare feet twitchedit was not fairwith every goddess, queen, and bitchfrom there to hereyou scratched your itchwe did much lessthan what you didyou judged us badyou had the spearyou had the wordat your commandwe scrubbed the bloodof our deadparamours from floors, from chairsfrom stairs, from doors,we knelt in waterwhile you staredat our bare feetit was not fairyou licked our fearit gave you pleasureyou raised your handyou watched us fallwe danced on airthe ones you failedthe ones you killed."
Feminism
"Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock."
Family
"Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself."
Art
"Because I am a mother, I am capable of being shocked: as I never was when I was not one."
Family
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"Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever."
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Personal Development
"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."
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Personal Development
"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
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Personal Development
"Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature."
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Personal Development
"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."
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Personal Development
"If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up."
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Personal Development
"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
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Personal Development
"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
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Personal Development
"A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing."
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Personal Development
"A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures."
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Personal Development
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