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"In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art."
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"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
"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."
Author Name
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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once-and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters."
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"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't."
Life
"How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop."
Literature
"How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet."
Memory
"Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior."
Life
"Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?"
Philosophy
"History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us."
History
"One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped - it was his only hope now - that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying , would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely."
Resilience
"What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths."
Philosophy
"Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake."
Art
"May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby."
Life
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