The Literary Life

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain." - Louisa May Alcott

[lemaldusiecle]

Repose en paix, dear Marjane Satrapi (1969-2026).

You were my goal during my teenage years. Photographs by Rahi Rezvani 🖤

[chantssecrets]

James Baldwin with students at Bowling Green State University, 1978-9. © BGSU University

[chantssecrets]

James Baldwin in Paris, 1972, 📸 by Sophie Bassouls

[chantssecrets]

I am the man. I suffered,

I was there.

-Whitman

In Baldwin’s hand, cover page for the manuscript of Giovanni’s Room.

[macrolit]

by Langston Hughes

[quotespile]

“With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: “My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.””

— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

[lonequixote]

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

— Dylan Thomas

[quotespile]

“If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.”

— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

[undinesea]

A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction No. 143, from The Paris Review, issue no. 137

[beautyisanillusion]

“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”

— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

[quotespile]

“European nights might be pitch-dark or coal-black, but not American nights, which are dark like a void, where there’s nothing to hold on to, no shelter from the elements, just empty, storm-whipped space, above and below.”

— Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

[nemfrog]

Withdrawn.

Source

[booksalon]

I miss the sound of books being stamped in the library.

[megairea]

“History suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom recorded, whose secret flowerings breed peace and war, loves and hates, the crowning or uncrowning of heads.”

— Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1967

[bookmatter]

Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson

[nemfrog]

To the reader.

Source

[macrolit]

“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.”

— The Dying Animal, Philip Roth (b. 19 March 1933)

[quotespile]

“He was almost intrigued by the idea of giving in to his oddness, turning into one of those remote, ineffectual creatures, so warped by their solitude that they became distasteful to normal people.”

— Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer