Backbone Literary Quotes

With over 5,000 years of continuous history, the subcontinent known as India has flourished. Its culture, people, and history have added a crucial, colorful chapter to the history of humankind as a whole. India has participated in many events that shaped the progress and future of mankind, and its art, philosophy, literature, and culture have influenced billions. From the culture's inception in the Indus Valley or Harappan Civilization, the people of the Indian subcontinent have acted as the fulcrum between the east and west. Their civilization once flourished as a trading titan and provided the ancient world with a rich and varied society, unlike its contemporaries it did so without succumbing to the horrors of war. This tradition of economic and philosophic focus would be transmitted throughout the ages through each of the different eras in Indian history. In the ancient world, the Indus Valley civilization provided the backbone of what would become Indian culture. As the society eventually collapsed, it left behind traces of its existence to be found and adopted by the Vedic peoples that sprung from their demise. In the Vedic period, Indian culture and history were shaped and transformed into literary masterpieces that survive today as a lynchpin of Hindu philosophy. It also saw the birth of Buddhism, the ascension of the Buddha and the spread of a counter culture that has expanded far across the globe, influencing the lives of millions. This very formative era in Indian history gives modern-day society an idea of what the structure of Indian history and society would become. This feudal period in India was one of ideological development in both the Vedic or Hindu ways and the ways of the Sramana traditions that arose as a countercultural movement. These two ideologies would go on to influence the various empires that would begin to form after the Vedic Age. In the Age of Empires, the Indian subcontinent would witness the birth of empires like that of Cyrus the Great in Persia and Alexander the Great of Macedonia. The disunity of the Indian kingdoms would allow foreign invaders to influence this era, but although the smaller Indian kingdoms were defeated in many ways, India remained unconquered as a whole. From this disunity and vulnerability, the first Indian empires would begin taking shape. From the Mauryan to the Gupta and beyond, the first Indian empires would shape the history of India in ways that are hard to fathom. Science, mathematics, art, architecture, and literature would flourish in this age. This period would provide India with a national identity that hangs on to this day. In the Age of Muslim Expansion, India was introduced to yet another vital part of its history and culture. Though many wars were fought between the Indian kingdoms and the Muslim sultanates, the people of the Indian subcontinent adopted an attitude of religious tolerance that persists to this day. In modern-day India, you can see the influence of the Muslim cultures that put down roots in India during this time, most notably in the Taj Mahal. In the Age of Exploration, the expansion of European power across the globe would shape the history of India under the Portuguese, Dutch, and eventually the British. This period, although known for exploitation, can also be attributed with the birth of Indian democracy and republican values that we would see born in the modern age. Though the modern age is but a minuscule fraction of the gravitas of Indian history, it maintains itself as a colorful portrait of the Indian soul. If one truly wants to understand Indian history, one but has to look at the astounding culture of modern-day India. The 50 events chosen to be illustrated in this book are but a few of the thousands if not millions of crucial events that shaped and built the extravagance of the country we now call India.

Kate Millett: Marxist, feminist, advocate for gay rights, for new sexuality, for new spousal relationships, and on and on. She channeled her revolutionary energies into a campaign to take down marriage and family, the backbone of American society. And she practiced what she preached. Though she was married, she practiced lesbianism, becoming bisexual. She had started that lifestyle at Columbia while writing Sexual Politics. This would, predictably, end her marriage to her husband, who found the trashing of these norms unnatural and detrimental to the health of their marriage. Of course, to many in our brave new world, this makes Kate a heroine. Today, the bio for Kate Millett at the “GLBTQ” website hails her as a “groundbreaking” “bisexual feminist literary and social critic.

Yes—oh dear yes—the novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist…. We are all like Scheherazade’s husband in that we want to know what happens next. That is universal and that is why the backbone of a novel has to be a story…. Qua story, it can have only one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next. These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story. It is both the lowest and simplest of literary organisms. Yet it is the highest factor common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels. [E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel]

It's a great paradox: we come from a lost world we can only glimpse when it disappears. Our image of orality comes from books. We gain our familiarity with winged words through their opposite, words fixed in writing and therefore made motionless. Once transcribed, these stories lost their fluidity, their flexibility, the freedom of improvisation, and , in many cases, their characteristic language forever. For this legacy to be saved, it had to be mortally wounded. It is wounded yet remains fascinating. The wealth of imagination at the dawn of our culture has survived without fully fading into the mists of time. We hear its distant echoes in the transcription of mythologies, fables, sagas, folk songs, and traditional tales. Transformed, recast, and reinterpreted, we find it in The Iliad and The Odyssey, the Greek tragedies, the Torah (and the Old Testament), The Ramayana, The Edda, And The Thousand and One Nights, And it's precisely these exiled stories - literary refugees in the foreign land of written texts - that5 make up the backbone of our culture.