the second star
August 2011
157 posts
“Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
—Rumi (via inspiri)
“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (via wordsfrombooks)
“The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions—one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.”
—Oscar Wilde (via logithebear)
“I’m just not the type of person who accumulates friends or enjoys crowds. I’m good with words, but not the spoken kind; I’ve often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper. And I suppose, in a sense, that’s what I do, for I’ve hundreds of the other sort, the friends contained within bindings, page after glorious page of ink, stories that unfold the same way every time but never lose their joy, that take me by the hand and lead me through doorways into worlds of great terror and rapturous delight. Exciting, worthy, reliable companions…”
—The Distant Hours by Kate Morton (via thebookishdark)
“We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.”
—F. Sionil José (via bookmania)
“You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.”
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky (via bookmania)
“I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church—was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus’s moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow—anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night.
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” —To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (via booksloveback)
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” —To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (via booksloveback)
“Dreams are necessary to life.”
—Anais Nin (via myquotelibrary)
“Stuff your eyes with wonder … live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
—Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451 (via bookshavepores)
“That is absurd. One has a right to Bunbury anywhere one chooses. Every serious Bunburyist knows that.”
—Algernon Moncrieff, The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde (via wilde-isms)
“I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.”
—Markus Zusak. (via fuckyeahmarkuszusak)
“A novel is like a window, open to an infinite landscape.”
—Isabel Allende (via missneonfishie)
