Literature Christmas Quotes

Then came the healing time, hearts started to shine, soul felt so fine, oh what a freeing time it was.

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.

If I were the Devil . . . I mean, if I were the Prince of Darkness, I would of course, want to engulf the whole earth in darkness. I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree, so I should set about however necessary to take over the United States. I would begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” “Do as you please.” To the young, I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is “square”. In the ears of the young marrieds, I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be extreme in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct. And the old, I would teach to pray. I would teach them to say after me: “Our Father, which art in Washington” . . . If I were the devil, I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull an uninteresting. I’d threaten T.V. with dirtier movies and vice versa. And then, if I were the devil, I’d get organized. I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing and less work, because idle hands usually work for me. I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. And I’d tranquilize the rest with pills. If I were the devil, I would encourage schools to refine yound intellects but neglect to discipline emotions . . . let those run wild. I would designate an athiest to front for me before the highest courts in the land and I would get preachers to say “she’s right.” With flattery and promises of power, I could get the courts to rule what I construe as against God and in favor of pornography, and thus, I would evict God from the courthouse, and then from the school house, and then from the houses of Congress and then, in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion, and I would deify science because that way men would become smart enough to create super weapons but not wise enough to control them. If I were Satan, I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg, and the symbol of Christmas, a bottle. If I were the devil, I would take from those who have and I would give to those who wanted, until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. And then, my police state would force everybody back to work. Then, I could separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines, and objectors in slave camps. In other words, if I were Satan, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing. (Speech was broadcast by ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey on April 3, 1965)

Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Christmas is the marriage of chaos and design. The real sound of life, for once, can burst out because a formal place has been set for it. At the moment when things have gotten sufficiently loose, the secret selves that these familiar persons hold inside them shake the room...An undercurrent of clowning and jostling is part of the process by which we succeed finally in making our necessary noise: despite the difficulty of getting the words right, of getting the singers on the same page, of keeping the ritual from falling apart into the anarchy of separate impulses. From such clatter--extended and punctuated by whatever instrument is handy, a triangle a tambourine, a Chinese gone--beauty is born.

Don't worry, Ian. I totally protected your anonymity. I told her you were my brother." "Great," he pouted."Now she's going to ask me about you. And I told you--I'm friendly and pleasant and then I move on." "You can do that. She'll find you perfectly understandable." "Oh? And why's that?" "Well, she wondered about you. Said you ask for some heavy reading sometimes, but that you didn't make much conversation." "Oh, really?" "Yes," Marcie explained. "I said you were brilliant, but not a very social animal. I said she shouldn't expect a lot of chitchat from you, but you were perfectly nice and there was no reason to be shy around you--you're safer than you look." "Is that so? And how did you convince her of that?" "Easy. I said you were an idiot savant--brilliant in literature and many other things, but socially you weren't on your game." "Oh, Jesus Christ!" -Ian and Marcie

The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979)

ROBERT DOUGLAS-FAIRHURST is Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2002).

We were always eating expired things. Milk, bread, biscuits, cake. We forgot about them as they sat around the house and just as they had gone bad, we put them in our mouths. Chocolates I brought back with me from Australia, cheeses in last year's Christmas hamper, juice from the last time someone decided to go grocery shopping. We didn't always realize they tasted funny – not everything curdles and a two-month-old orange can be just as sweet. When we did, it was usually too late. Sometimes it wasn't. We finished what we had started anyway.

The smile floating on her lips. She’s bored as well. She feels a bit guilty since she should feel great, there with all her family—but she suppresses a yawn. She’d rather be elsewhere. She’s no longer used to long meals. She never liked them, by the way. I realize that I’m trying to invent a life for her. That’s the problem with literature. One narrates. One embroiders. One adds material.

How can they possibly know such things? No member of this family reads novels, except for mass-market bestsellers, clichéd thrillers with contrived plots, idiotic romances or discounted pseudoeroticism. And so forth. They drag the books around with them during the summer, glancing at a few lines and then quickly going back to their preferred activities—catching up on the latest gossip and convincing themselves that the life they’ve chosen is better than it is. Voilà. The absence of literature, among my children, is the most crushing failure of my existence. It’s not yours, Hélène, I know. You used to reproach my passion for reading. My dilettantism—you used to say there are so many other more interesting and certainly more useful things to do—fixing things around the house, rearranging the furniture, laundry, cooking. Don’t misunderstand me. I did my share of household chores, you can’t say otherwise, but it was never enough.

Their management and regulation of our lives spans the total spectrum of American experience, from their obtuse Imperial Measurement System, to their irregularity-strangled English language. From their lobbyist-ruled government bureaucracy, to their consumer-oriented religious holidays like Christmas. From their brainless professional sports jocks cast as heroes, to their anorexic supermodels warping the concept of beauty. These are the people who made sugary colas more important that water; fast food more important than health; television sitcoms more important than reading literature. They made smoking a joint in your home a crime; going out in public without your hair tinted an embarrassment; and accidentally carrying a half-filled bottle of baby formula on an airplane a terrorist act. Do you realize 85 percent of Americans still say 'God bless you' after someone sneezes? And that 'In God We Trust' is on every single dollar in circulation? Or that 'One nation under God' is recited everyday in the Pledge of Allegiance by millions of impressionable kids?

God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead. Love was dead. Death was dead. A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead. But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex lives were dead, conversation was dead. Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water. Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower. Ghosts themselves weren’t dead, not exactly. Instead, the following questions came up: “are ghosts dead are ghosts dead or alive are ghosts deadly” but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning (Christmas, too, dead), and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead):

For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you

For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you”.

If one could nominate an absolutely tragic day in human history, it would be the occasion that is now commemorated by the vapid and annoying holiday known as “Hannukah.” For once, instead of Christianity plagiarizing from Judaism, the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with “Christmas,” which is itself a quasi-Christian annexation, complete with burning logs and holly and mistletoe, of a pagan Northland solstice originally illuminated by the Aurora Borealis. Here is the terminus to which banal “multiculturalism” has brought us. But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.

His wife was dead, his career in the ministry finished. He was leaving theology and the pastoral office behind and setting out toward a goal he could not see but which he knew involved both literature and natural history. “Things seem flying to pieces,” Charles wrote Aunt Mary. Late in December 1832 the brig Jasper, 236 tons, cleared for Malta. There was a northeaster coming as Captain Ellis headed the ship, with Emerson aboard, out into the gray Atlantic swells. It was Christmas Day.7

Merry Christmas”—Bing Crosby singing “Adeste fideles” on The Voice of State Street

Their management and regulation of our lives spans the total spectrum of American experience, from their obtuse Imperial Measurement System, to their irregularity-strangled English language. From their lobbyist-ruled government bureaucracy, to their consumer-oriented religious holidays like Christmas. From their brainless professional sports jocks cast as heroes, to their anorexic supermodels warping the concept of beauty. These are the people who made sugary colas more important than water; fast food more important than health; television sitcoms more important than reading literature. They made smoking a joint in your home a crime; going out in public without your hair tinted an embarrassment; and accidentally carrying a half-filled bottle of baby formula on an airplane a terrorist act. Do you realize 85 percent of Americans still say ‘God bless you’ after someone sneezes? And that ‘In God We Trust’ is on every U.S. dollar in circulation? Or that ‘One nation under God’ is recited every day in the Pledge of Allegiance by millions of impressionable kids?

Don’t worry, Ian. I totally protected your anonymity. I told her you were my brother.” “Great,” he pouted. “Now she’s going to ask me about you. And I told you—I’m friendly and pleasant and then I move on.” “You can do that. She’ll find it perfectly understandable.” “Oh? And why’s that?” “Well, she wondered about you. Said you ask for some heavy reading sometimes, but that you didn’t make much conversation.” “Oh, really?” “Yes,” Marcie explained. “I said you were brilliant, but not a very social animal. I said she shouldn’t expect a lot of chitchat from you, but you were perfectly nice, and there was no reason to be shy around you—you’re safer than you look.” “Is that so? And how did you convince her of that?” “Easy. I said you were an idiot savant—brilliant in literature and many other things, but socially you weren’t on your game.” “Oh, Jesus Christ!” She

They enjoyed the usual holiday traditions of a Christmas tree, big family dinner, you know, normal stuff but Amma had one tradition that she insisted be shared with me and all of my cousins, which was Jolabokaflod.” “A what flood?” “It translates to Christmas Book flood,” I said. “In Iceland it’s a tradition to give new books as gifts on Christmas Eve and then spend the evening reading.” “Seriously?” Sam asked. “As a writer and avid reader, I have to say that is awesome.

Exhausted, I decided to let him deal with this. The part of me that was always in charge was happy to relinquish authority for a change.

No one in my usual circle of acquaintances would have made it this far without a Xanax and an emergency call to their therapist.

I’m not going to say yes to Trey,” I said. “If he asks, it’s a no from me. You’ll never get the grandchildren you want.

To meet with things newborn: for the Christian, that is the hope that burns brightly at Christmas, and Pentecost, and Easter.

For two successive days, while perched up in the rigging, covered with tar and engaged in our disagreeable work, we saw these fellows going ashore in the morning, and coming off again at night, in high spirits. So much for being Protestants. There’s no danger of Catholicism’s spreading in New England; Yankees can’t afford the time to be Catholics. American shipmasters get nearly three weeks more labor out of their crews, in the course of a year, than the masters of vessels from Catholic countries. Yankees don’t keep Christmas, and shipmasters at sea never know when Thanksgiving comes, so Jack has no festival at all. About

OH, NIETZSCHE The last Christmas Eve of the nineteenth century was very cold Piercing winds and snow stuffed themselves into the cracks of every door and window As professors of philosophy gathered in the Golden Hall Their nonsense and hollow academic jargon were winning applause Feeling a chill, professors furrowed their brows And refined ladies unconsciously pulled their collars closed No one paid attention to the chill, no one even responded But the howling wind outside the window Swept across Europe’s wide sky Outside, Nietzsche was wandering around in the wilderness His thoughts were accompanied by the snowy winds and howls of wolves In this frozen world his thoughts shed their skin again and again Like a bloody struggle to be free of incorporeal chains He relentlessly pursued the truth No one could understand his eccentric and arrogant disposition No one could answer his disdain for this world For only a blizzard of manuscripts accompanied him Weathered by a tormenting disease Nietzsche bitterly suffered from his solitary meditation His discontent with thoughts surged like gales blowing the heavy snow Sweeping the sky and earth with a wild fervor What a pure yet brutal world At that moment the bells of a new century were ringing The generation of heroes Nietzsche called “supermen” From “Martin Eden” penned by Jack London To the old man who went fishing with Hemingway Have already shocked the whole world Through so many sleepless nights he endured the torture of disease Yet nurtured the poetic longing of solitude and indifference An infant thought undergoes the trauma of birth To finally cry out in an earth-shattering voice Nietzsche, before the sunrise changed the world The entire sky shimmered with your incandescent thoughts The nearly extinguished candle was burning your final passion Nietzsche, oh Nietzsche, let us walk on together

His Plot to Overthrow Christmas was pure delight: first heard Dec. 25, 1938, on Words Without Music, it told of a scheme by the demons of Hell to assassinate Santa Claus. “Did you hear about the plot to overthrow Christmas?” the narrator began: “Well, gather ye now from Maine to the Isthmus/Of Panama, and listen to the story/Of the utter inglory/Of some gory goings-on in Hell.” In Hell, the listener met as motley a crew of villains as history and literature had yet devised: Ivan the Terrible, Haman, Caligula, Medusa, Simon Legree, and Circe (Mercy!). Nero was fiddling, as was his wont, while Borgia thought of the North Pole jaunt: “Just think how it would tickle us/To liquidate St. Nicholas!” But the plot failed as Nero, sent to do the deed, turned into mush at Santa’s feet. House Jameson starred as Santa, with Will Geer as the Devil and Eric Burroughs as Nero.

Thus in Twelfth Night the fact that Malvolio is called demon-possessed, and is associated with the devil over and over again, points to his thematic role in the play. Like Satan, he is sick with self-love, falling by the force of his own gravity, as Chesterton said. Of course, Malvolio is a comic devil, not nearly so threatening as Iago or Shylock, but he is a devil nonetheless. And his devilry is manifest particularly in his desire to end the gaiety of Olivia’s house. Here especially the title of the play comes into its own. Twelfth Night is named for the last night of the Christmas season, the final celebration of the Incarnation. It is a night for carnival, for suspension of the serious and structured. Malvolio wants to stop the merriment, and so it is fitting that he is ultimately excluded from it. But more: Malvolio is not only excluded from the comic climax of the play. He is excluded and overcome through trickery, practical joking, mirth. Satan digs a pit for the merry, but Satan falls into the very pit of merriment. And it tortures him forever. In the final analysis, that is the practical import of all that has been said in this little book: the joy of Easter, the joy of resurrection, the joy of trinitarian life does not simply offer an alternative “worldview” to the tragic self-inflation of the ancients. Worked out in the joyful life of the Christian church, deep comedy is the chief weapon of our warfare. For in the joy of the Lord is our strength, and Satan shall be felled with “cakes and ale” and midnight revels.