“
Puns are the highest form of literature.
”
”
Alfred Hitchcock
“
A fit, healthy body—that is the best fashion statement
”
”
Jess C. Scott
“
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]
”
”
Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
“
Please, touch me, I pray.
”
”
Jess C. Scott (The Intern)
“
Literature doesn’t exactly have a strong mental-health track record.
”
”
Lemony Snicket
“
Kaz reached into his coat pocket. "Here," he said and handed Jesper a slender book with an elaborate cover.
"Are we going to read to each other?"
"Just flip it open to the back."
Jesper opened the book and peered at the last page, puzzled. "So?"
"Hold it up so we don't have to look at your ugly face."
"My face has character. Besides - oh!"
"An excellent read, isn't it?"
"Who knew I had a taste for literature?
”
”
Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1))
“
You can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry.
”
”
E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly (Gadfly Saga, #1))
“
[novan]: bassists are very good with their fingers
[novan]: and some of us sing backup vocals, so that means we're good with our mouths too...
(~ IM chat with Novan Chang, 18, bassist)
”
”
Jess C. Scott (EyeLeash: A Blog Novel)
“
It was like hiking into a Hemingway story; everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext.
”
”
Leslie What (Crazy Love)
“
A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.
”
”
Arthur Schopenhauer (The Art of Literature)
“
Perfect,” he groaned. “You are perfect.” He sank his teeth into her ass, hard, drawing blood. “And now you wear my mark,” he finished proudly. “Your ass is mine.
”
”
Hanna Lui (Suck)
“
Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?
”
”
Colson Whitehead
“
We’re at the crematorium having lunch,”—which struck Torn as a darkly funny thing to say—“but I’m glad you called.
”
”
L.M. Weeks (Bottled Lightning)
Ernest Hemingway (Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961 (Scribner Classics))
“
What the hell. If you had to go, why not go with style?
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
“
The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.
”
”
Ben Macintyre (Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal)
“
Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.
”
”
James Joyce
“
There is much to discover that's not on the back cover!
”
”
E.A. Bucchianeri
“
I believe books should be like a prime rib steak ~ good and thick.
”
”
E.A. Bucchianeri
“
A little vanilla never hurt anybody.” He nipped her ankle. “Great shoes by the way. Sexy as hell.
”
”
Hanna Lui (Blow)
“
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.
”
”
A.S. Byatt (Possession)
“
It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
Besides being witty and funny and maybe the best novel ever written, it’s also the most perfect romance in all of literature and nothing in life can ever measure up, so I spend my life limping in its shadow.
”
”
Shannon Hale (Austenland (Austenland, #1))
“
You can always tell a pig by its grunt.
”
”
Nikolai Gogol (The Inspector General)
“
You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
[...] and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
“
I am sure it is something really groundbreaking and important, Totally new and fresh. Like a story about a disillusioned white guy, wandering the world, misunderstood and coldly horny.
”
”
Emily Henry (Beach Read)
“
I remember when I left Hungary," Zoltan said, "understanding so completely that literature could save me as much as it could get me killed. Of course it's not like that here. But isn't it funny, that in some ways the price one pays for freedom of speech is ... a kind of indifference.
”
”
Daphne Kalotay (Russian Winter)
“
Turning on the shower, he thought of the wildly fancy bathroom at Charlotte's house. It was funny to think of, but the bathrooms he liked weren't fancy; this one, and the one at Seymour's, and the one at Harry's. They weren't fancy, but they were home. He got in the shower. The one squirt that always went haywire hit him right in the eye. He laughed up into the warm water running over his ears.
”
”
Louise Fitzhugh
“
Dear Literary World, Sorry for breaking down your door...I'll pay for that!!! Since I'm here and planning to stay a while, let me tell you some stories!!
”
”
C.K. Webb
“
I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hungarian for the lower classes of the gymnasium, for kids from 10 to 14. I never made use of this teaching certificate. And then I came to philosophy, physics, and mathematics. In fact, I came to mathematics indirectly. I was really more interested in physics and philosophy and thought about those. It is a little shortened but not quite wrong to say: I thought I am not good enough for physics and I am too good for philosophy. Mathematics is in between.
”
”
George Pólya
“
As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own — they even, for God’s sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, ‘I want to raise some questions about so-and-so’, and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys.
”
”
David Lodge
“
No matter how strong you are, you cannot hold open the jaws of a great-white shark with your bare hands... that can do your brain.
”
”
Ivan Stoikov
“
Punctuation was, it is sad to say, invented a very long time ago. Even more frustrating, it has remained with us ever since.
”
”
Anne Elizabeth Moore (The Manifesti of Radical Literature)
“
There is always an element of suffering even in the happiness of the Russian people, and without it their happiness is incomplete - Dostoyevsky
”
”
Sara Wheeler (Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Other Geniuses of the Golden Age)
“
If he was so goddam stupid not to realize it was Saturday night and everybody was out or asleep or home for the week end, I wasn't going to break my neck telling him.
”
”
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
“
I don’t have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes—and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don’t think jokes even belong in proper books. I won’t bother breaking the news that, if they remain readers, they will insist on depressing themselves for about a decade of their lives, in a concerted search of gravitas through literature.
”
”
Nick Hornby (More Baths, Less Talking)
“
How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.
”
”
Alice Munro (Too Much Happiness: Stories)
“
Dance critics all over the world have called my body moves, “Sculpturesque,” “As full of motion as a Rodin statue,” and “Like watching Helen Keller eat Jell-O with her elbows.” My dancing is so still and silent that it belongs on a shelf in a library, next to other great literature.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat)
“
I don’t know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we’re not happy. Something’s missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I’d burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.”
“You’re a hopeless romantic,” said Faber. “It would be funny if it were not serious. It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the "parlour families” today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget.
”
”
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
“
Every animal is a tradition, and together they are a vast part of our heritage as human beings. No animal completely lacks humanity, yet no person is ever completely human. By ourselves, we people are simply balls of protoplasm. We merge with animals through magic, metaphor, or fantasy, growing their fangs and putting on their feathers. Then we become funny or tragic; we can be loved, hated, pitied, and admired. For us, animals are all the strange, beautiful, pitiable, and frightening things that they have ever been: gods, slaves, totems, sages, tricksters, devils, clowns, companions, lovers, and far more.
”
”
Boria Sax (The Mythical Zoo: An Encyclopedia of Animals in World Myth, Legend, and Literature)
“
The more you exaggerate, the more you will look funny!
”
”
Mehmet Murat ildan
“
That man behaves so much like the villain in a work of literature, it’s almost funny,” Arsibalt observed.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Anathem)
“
Isn’t it funny the way some combinations of words can give you – apart from their meaning – a thrill like music?
”
”
C.S. Lewis (Letters of C. S. Lewis (Edited, with a Memoir, by W. H. Lewis))
“
It's a queer thing is a man's soul. It is the whole of him. Which means it is the unknown him, as well as the known. It seems to me just funny, professors and Benjamins fixing the functions of the soul. Why, the soul of man is a vast forest, and all Benjamin intended was a neat back garden. And we've all got to fit into his kitchen garden scheme of things. Hail Columbia !
The soul of man is a dark forest. The Hercynian Wood that scared the Romans so, and out of which came the white- skinned hordes of the next civilization.
Who knows what will come out of the soul of man? The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it off!
Oh, but Benjamin fenced a little tract that he called the soul of man, and proceeded to get it into cultivation. Providence, forsooth! And they think that bit of barbed wire is going to keep us in pound for ever? More fools they.
...
Man is a moral animal. All right. I am a moral animal. And I'm going to remain such. I'm not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me. 'This is good, that is bad. Turn the little handle and let the good tap flow,' saith Benjamin, and all America with him. 'But first of all extirpate those savages who are always turning on the bad tap.'
I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine. I don't work with a little set of handles or levers. The Temperance- silence-order- resolution-frugality-industry-sincerity - justice- moderation-cleanliness-tranquillity-chastity-humility keyboard is not going to get me going. I'm really not just an automatic piano with a moral Benjamin getting tunes out of me.
Here's my creed, against Benjamin's. This is what I believe:
'That I am I.'
' That my soul is a dark forest.'
'That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.'
'Thatgods, strange gods, come forth f rom the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.'
' That I must have the courage to let them come and go.'
' That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.'
There is my creed. He who runs may read. He who prefers to crawl, or to go by gasoline, can call it rot.
”
”
D.H. Lawrence (Studies in Classic American Literature)
“
O, I do read Indian novels sometimes. But you know, Ms Rupinder, what we Indians want in literature, at least the kind written in English, is not literature at all, but flattery. We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful, sensitive, profound, valorous, wounded, tolerant and funny beings. All that Jhumpa Lahiri stuff. But the truth is, we are absolutely nothing of that kind. What are we, then, Ms Rupinder? We are animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbour's children in five minutes, and our own in ten. Keep this in mind before you do any business in this country.
”
”
Aravind Adiga (Selection Day)
“
A dessert to a deserter in the desert burst, "You trust your thirst. And you are too hot! You scream for ice cream. And believe it or not, I may not be your first. But I might be your lust! Give it a shot...
”
”
Ana Claudia Antunes (One Hundred One World Accounts in One Hundred One Word Count)
“
perhaps there had been something a little obsessive about it, the way she’d consumed the shelves of the local library, Blyton to Jansson, C. S. Lewis to P. G. Wodehouse, Christie then du Maurier then the Brontës, reading indiscriminately but always passionately, so that even her dislikes were passionate. Dickens, she thought, was preachy and silly, like a teacher putting on funny voices, but never mind, here were Jane Austen and Sue Townsend, Ursula K. Le Guin and Jean M. Auel, and each Saturday morning she’d return her stack of library books, the maximum permitted, placing them on the counter, like a gambler cashing in chips.
”
”
David Nicholls (You Are Here)
“
If you're signing up all the pretty girls in Alden, I want to join too," Max told Christy.
"We aren't taking men," she explained.
He cocked his eyebrow. "What? We aren't sensitive enough for your kind of literature?"
Christy turned to Annie and both broke into laughter. Annie leaned closer to Max and whispered, "We are talking cliterature here."
His roguish smile was breathtaking. "Oh clits and chicks, I can handle that," he answered with a wink, his eyes glittering with laughter.
”
”
Elle Aycart (Inked Ever After (Bowen Boys, #2.5))
“
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.
”
”
Cheryl Julia Lee (We Were Always Eating Expired Things)
“
Dave and Serge...played the Fiddler's Elbow as if it were Giants Stadium, and even though it was acoustic, they just about blew the place up. They were standing on chairs adn lying on the floor, they were funny, they charmed everyone in the pub apart from an old drunk ditting next to the drum kit...who put his fingers firmly in his ears during Serge's extended harmonica solo. It was utterly bizarre and very moving: most musicians wouldn't have bothered turning up, let alone almost killing themselves. And I was reminded...how rarely one feels included in a live show. Usually you watch, and listen, and drift off, and the band plays well or doesn't and it doesn't matter much either way. It can actually be a very lonely experience. But I felt a part of the music, and a part of the people I'd gone with, and, to cut this short before the encores, I didn't want to read for about a fortnight afterward. I wanted to write, but I didn't want to read no book. I was too itchy, too energized, and if young people feel like that every night of the week, then, yes, literature 's dead as a dodo.
(Nick's thoughts after seeing Marah at a little pub called Fiddler's Elbow.)
”
”
Nick Hornby (The Polysyllabic Spree)
“
I find people confusing.
This is for two main reasons.
The first main reason is that people do a lot of talking without using any words. Siobhan says that if you raise one eyebrow it can mean lots of different things. It can mean "I want to do sex with you" and it can also mean "I think that what you said was very stupid.
”
”
Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (SparkNotes Literature Guide) (Volume 25) (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series))
“
Najia can feel yts subdermal activators against her forearm. Not man not woman not both not neither. Nute. Another way of being human, speaking a phsyical language she does not understand. More alien to her than any man, any father, yet this body next to hers is loyal, tough, funny courageous, clever, kind, sensual, vulnerable. Sweet. Sexy. All you could wish in a friend of the soul. Or a lover.
”
”
Ian McDonald (River of Gods (India 2047, #1))
“
Irma, she said. But I had started to walk away. I heard her say some more things but by then I had yanked my skirt up and was running down the road away from her and begging the wind to obliterate her voice. She wanted to live with me. She missed me. She wanted me to come back home. She wanted to run away. She was yelling all this stuff and I wanted so badly for her to shut up. She was quiet for a second and I stopped running and turned around once to look at her. She was a thimble-sized girl on the road, a speck of a living thing. Her white-blond hair flew around her head like a small fire and it was all I could see because everything else about her blended in with the countryside.
He offered you a what? she yelled.
An espresso! I yelled back. It was like yelling at a shorting wire or a burning bush.
What is it? she said.
Coffee! I yelled.
Irma, can I come and live--
I turned around again and began to run.
”
”
Miriam Toews (Irma Voth)
“
This is nice,' Melody said, picking up a red leather box with a vintage watch inside.
'Yes, it is nice. It's the watch I gave Walker as a wedding gift.'
'He gave it back?'
'Actually, he sold it back to the person I bought it from who alerted me and I reacquired it.'
'I'm sorry. That sounds upsetting.'
'It was. Very. Especially since he sold the watch to buy combs for my long hair and without knowing what he had done I sold my hair to buy a leather case for this watch.
”
”
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, The Nest
“
This is nice,' Melody said, picking up a red leather box with a vintage watch inside.
'Yes, it is nice. It's the watch I gave Walker as a wedding gift.'
'He gave it back?'
'Actually, he sold it back to the person I bought it from who alerted me and I reacquired it.'
'I'm sorry. That sounds upsetting.'
'It was. Very. Especially since he sold the watch to buy combs for my long hair and without knowing what he had done I sold my hair to buy a leather case for this watch.
”
”
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (The Nest)
“
Alien monsters were pleasant and funny. One early and almost forgotten piece of history tells that Adam, in addition to naming all the sub-lunar creatures, also named the nine hundred and ninety-nine species of creatures who had their homes and nests above the moon, on other moons or trabants or asteroids or planets. And after they were named, the super-lunary creatures went back to their own places, with friendly memories of Earth, the ‘naming place’. So we do have nine hundred and ninety-nine alien species, monstrous but friendly, waiting to meet us again.
”
”
R.A. Lafferty (It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs (Essays on Fantastic Literature 1))
“
When I met Oodgeroo, I met my mother: not just Dossie’s poise, eyes and Lindt-like skin, but the funny-bugger with a steak knife, buried, a serrated intensity that unsettled me—a boy of elocution lessons and an easier ride, 25 a man of lighter brown travelling, whose tab of overt intolerance came in at insults and one lost girlfriend. I wasn’t there when indignity did its daily round—rarely blunt, rather, a pointed 30 needling that cut near the core, left wounds that broke their stitches every morning I did know that the sharp steel about Oodgeroo was also about my mother. On campus—
”
”
Anita Heiss (Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature)
“
Falstaff is the most unusual figure in fiction. He is almost entirely a good man, a glorious, life-affirming good man, and there is hardly a good man in dramatic literature. There has always been an England, an older England, which was sweeter, purer, where the hay smelled better and the weather was always springtime and the daffodils blew in the gentle warm breezes. You feel a nostalgia for it in Chaucer, and you feel it all throughout Shakespeare. Falstaff is a refugee from that world. He has to live by his wits, he has to be funny, he has no place to sleep if he doesn’t get a laugh out of his patron. It’s a rough modern world that he’s living in. You’ve got to be able to see that look in his eyes that comes out of the age that never existed, the one that exists in the heart of all English poetry.
”
”
Orson Welles
“
You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy."
"Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening.
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
“
When it begins it is like a light in a tunnel, a rush of steel and
steam across a torn up life. It is a low rumble, an earthquake in the
back of the mind. My spine is a track with cold black steel racing on
it, a trail of steam and dust following behind, ghost like. It feels
like my whole life is holding its breath.
By the time she leaves the room I am surprised that she can’t see the
train. It has jumped the track of my spine and landed in my mothers’
living room. A cold dark thing, black steel and redwood paneling. It
is the old type, from the western movies I loved as a kid.
He throws open the doors to the outside world, to the dark ocean. I
feel a breeze tugging at me, a slender finger of wind that catches at
my shirt. Pulling. Grabbing. I can feel the panic build in me, the
need to scream or cry rising in my throat.
And then I am out the door, running, tumbling down the steps falling
out into the darkened world, falling out into the lifeless ocean. Out
into the blackness. Out among the stars and shadows.
And underneath my skin, in the back of my head and down the back of my
spine I can feel the desperation and I can feel the noise. I can feel
the deep and ancient ache of loudness that litters across my bones.
It’s like an old lover, comfortable and well known, but unwelcome and
inappropriate with her stories of our frolicking.
And then she’s gone and the Conductor is closing the door. The
darkness swells around us, enveloping us in a cocoon, pressing flat
against the train like a storm. I wonder, what is this place?
Those had been heady days, full and intense. It’s funny. I remember
the problems, the confusions and the fears of life we all dealt with.
But, that all seems to fade. It all seems to be replaced by images of
the days when it was all just okay. We all had plans back then,
patterns in which we expected the world to fit, how it was to be
deciphered.
Eventually you just can’t carry yourself any longer, can’t keep your
eyelids open, and can’t focus on anything but the flickering light of
the stars. Hours pass, at first slowly like a river and then all in a
rush, a climax and I am home in the dorm, waking up to the ringing of
the telephone.
When she is gone the apartment is silent, empty, almost like a person
sleeping, waiting to wake up. When she is gone, and I am alone, I curl
up on the bed, wait for the house to eject me from its dying corpse.
Crazy thoughts cross through my head, like slants of light in an
attic.
The Boston 395 rocks a bit, a creaking noise spilling in from the
undercarriage. I have decided that whatever this place is, all these
noises, sensations - all the train-ness of this place - is a
fabrication. It lulls you into a sense of security, allows you to feel
as if it’s a familiar place. But whatever it is, it’s not a train, or
at least not just a train.
The air, heightened, tense against the glass. I can hear the squeak of
shoes on linoleum, I can hear the soft rattle of a dying man’s
breathing. Men in white uniforms, sharp pressed lines, run past,
rolling gurneys down florescent hallways.
”
”
Jason Derr (The Boston 395)
“
And immediately we rushed like horses, wild with the knowledge of this song, and bolted into a startingly loud harmony:
'Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves; Britons, never-never-ne-verr shall be slaves!'
and singing, I saw the kings and the queens in the room with us, laughing in a funny way, and smiling and happy with us. The headmaster was soaked in glee. And I imagined all the glories of Britannia, who, or what or which, had brought us out of the ships crossing over from the terrible seas from Africa, and had placed us on this island, and had given us such good headmasters and assistant masters, and such a nice vicar to teach us how to pray to God - and he had come from England; and such nice white people who lived on the island with us, and who gave us jobs watering their gardens and taking out their garbage, most of which we found delicious enough to eat...all through the ages, all through the years of history; from the Tudors on the wall, down through the Stuarts also on the wall, all through the Elizabethans and including those men and women singing in their hearts with us, hanging dead and distant on our schoolroom walls; Britannia, who, or what or which, had ruled the waves all these hundreds of years, all these thousands and millions of years, and kept us on the island, happy - the island of Barbados (Britannia the Second), free from all invasions. Not even the mighty Germans; not even the Russians whom our headmaster said were dressed in red, had dared to come within submarine distance of our island! Britannia who saw to it that all Britons (we on the island were, beyond doubt, little black Britons, just like the white big Britons up in Britannialand. The headmaster told us so!) - never-never-ne-verr, shall be slaves!
”
”
Austin Clarke (Amongst Thistles and Thorns (Caribbean Modern Classics))
“
In April 2012, The New York Times published a heart-wrenching essay by Claire Needell Hollander, a middle school English teacher in the New York City public schools. Under the headline “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart,” she began with an anecdote about teaching John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As her class read the end together out loud in class, her “toughest boy,” she wrote, “wept a little, and so did I.” A girl in the class edged out of her chair to get a closer look and asked Hollander if she was crying. “I am,” she said, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.” Hollander, a reading enrichment teacher, shaped her lessons around robust literature—her classes met in small groups and talked informally about what they had read. Her students did not “read from the expected perspective,” as she described it. They concluded (not unreasonably) that Holden Caulfield “was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage.” One student read Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies as raps. Another, having been inspired by Of Mice and Men, went on to read The Grapes of Wrath on his own and told Hollander how amazed he was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” She knew that these classes were enhancing her students’ reading levels, their understanding of the world, their souls. But she had to stop offering them to all but her highest-achieving eighth-graders. Everyone else had to take instruction specifically targeted to boost their standardized test scores. Hollander felt she had no choice. Reading scores on standardized tests in her school had gone up in the years she maintained her reading group, but not consistently enough. “Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data,” she wrote. “But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. Because I play a leadership role in the English department, I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test preparation tutorial program.” Instead of Steinbeck and Shakespeare, her students read “watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures.” They studied vocabulary words, drilled on how to write sentences, and practiced taking multiple-choice tests. The overall impact of such instruction, Hollander said, is to “bleed our English classes dry.” So
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Michael Sokolove (Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater)
“
My biggest fear is that Germans will suddenly be relaxed and in a good mood. We need our unfriendliness. We need our bad moods. We need the tantrums when someone takes our parking spot. It's the foundation of our world-famous literature." -Harald Schmidt
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Diana Mauer (German Wisdom: Funny, Inspirational and Thought-Provoking Quotes by Famous Germans)
“
But the youngest grandson committed it all to memory so that he could show off in the literature lesson at school—which he did with such a horrid affection of angelic innocence that his long-suffering form-master could not find an outwardly valid excuse for keeping him in. But he evened the score by putting in the term’s report that Crawley, S. A. (Septimus Arabin) would do better if he did not try to be funny.
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Angela Thirkell (Close Quarters: A Novel (Angela Thirkell Barsetshire Series))
“
Dear God,
make him hang out
with other women more.
He does not seem to realize
what a catch I am.
”
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Suhas Mahesh (How to Love in Sanskrit)
“
Never is a very long time.
Not long enough when it comes to Liam Maguire.
”
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Jenn McKinlay (The Attraction Distraction (A Museum of Literature Romance, #2))
“
Kun katselen heitä, mieleeni tulee se prinsessa, joka ei pystynyt nukkumaan, koska tunsi herneen sadan patjan alta. Uskon, että hekin varmasti heräisivät herneen aiheuttamaan häiriöön. Minä olen puolestani aivan toisenlainen. Teen kerran kokeenkin. Laitan patjan alle perunan, koska talostamme ei löydy yhtään hernettä. Nukun kuin tukki aamuun asti, vaikka patjoja on sadan sijasta vain yksi. Olen pettynyt. Minusta ei koskaan tule oikeaa prinsessaa. En koskaan pyörry tai joudu sairaalaan, vaikka myrskyt raivoaisivat ja kaupungit sortuisivat. En ole edes millekään allerginen.
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Saara Turunen (Rakkaudenhirviö)
“
There are always messages, even enigmas to be searched, mysteries to be solved in all of my books. I like to puzzle readers, but I do not make so to the point of being so complex that they will lose interest in the plot. And that for me is the essence of every great literature around the world, and that’s been so for ages.
(....)Some were inpired by real life characters, some other books I wrote are hybrid fiction/non-fiction, so I pretty much get inspired by people who have lived, and even who are still breathing among us… so don’t get discouraged if I didn’t mention your personality traits yet. I might even have your name over my books, I must some day…
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Ana Claudia Antunes (One Hundred One World Accounts in One Hundred One Word Count)
“
All the latchkey children cursed and smashed bottles, teased about underwear, and puffed on those unfiltered cigarettes that only the cowboys could roll.
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Bremer Acosta (Blood of Other Worlds)
“
Is he crazy? No one has ever told me my doodles are good, not that I flash them around or anything. Gen likes them, but she also thinks vampire romances are literature and sings along to 'Islands in the Stream.' Her tastes are dubious. She's not a reliable source.
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Jules Barnard (Deep Blue (Blue, #1))
“
Don’t challenge everything which challenges you! Don’t take every funny challenge serious and don’t see every weak menace as a big threat, keep your energy for the powerful challenges, for the big menaces!
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Mehmet Murat ildan
“
Thank you. There were three of us kids, all right together. I’m the oldest, she was the knee-baby, and my brother Henry came last. Funny, I miss her all the time, but I miss her most when I’m reading Austen. We’d been fans since we were in the seventh and eighth grade, two Creole girls gigglin’ about marriage proposals gone bad. Our daddy teased us about reading each other passages during a Fourth of July crawfish boil, so he named the biggest one Mr. Darcy and threw him in the pot.” She looked up, a smile fighting the tears in her eyes. “We refused to eat him.
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Mary Jane Hathaway (Persuasion, Captain Wentworth and Cracklin' Cornbread (Jane Austen Takes the South, #3))
“
There are two rooted spiritual realities out of which grow all kinds of democratic conception or sentiment of human equality. There are two things in which all men are manifestly unmistakably equal. They are not equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat, as the sages of the modern reaction (with piercing insight) perceive. But this is a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this again, is an equally sublime spiritual certainty, that all men are comic. No special and private sorrow can be so dreadful as the fact of having to die. And no freak or deformity can be so funny as the mere fact of having two legs. Every man is important if he loses his life; and every man is funny if he loses his hat, and has to run after it... These, I say, are two roots of democratic reality. But they have in more civilized literature, a more civilized embodiment or form. In literature such as that of the nineteenth century the two elements appear somewhat thus. Tragedy becomes a profound sense of human dignity. The other and jollier element becomes a delighted sense of human variety. The first supports equality by saying that all men are equally sublime. The second supports equality by observing that all men are equally interesting.
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G.K. Chesterton (Charles Dickens: A Critical Study)
“
A woman of little propriety may not receive the public’s respect, but she will gain their attendance.
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Caroline George (Dearest Josephine)
“
Ever since then there has been a strain of right wing political thought which blames everything in the world on the Illuminati and claims they still continue. I stumbled on this literature in the mid-60s. Most of it is obviously paranoid. It’s full of logical howlers such as only paranoids commit through a strong passion to prove an obsessive case, and I thought it was very funny.
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Robert Anton Wilson (Coincidance: A Head Test)
“
This. This is great literature. It’s not highbrow or intellectual, but it’s an experience. It makes the reader live and breathe and cry and mourn the losses of its characters before they celebrate the victories. It touches on passion and personal poignancy.
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Max Monroe (Accidental Attachment (It's A Funny Story #1))
“
Your agency bio states that you’re looking for great books but life is hard, Alister Tylte, and sometimes you have to settle for what you can get. Sometimes you’re someone’s McGill, but sometimes you’re their safety school, and that’s okay. I believe my book is a book, and you should probably be satisfied with that for your list.
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Zilla Novikov (Query)
“
It was the sort of style you ended up with when you assumed that because you’d studied literature and engineering you knew your hairdresser’s job better than they did.
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Brandon Sanderson (Yumi and the Nightmare Painter)
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Ihmiset ovat hauskoja. En ymmärrä ihmisiä niin kuin en ymmärrä useimpia asioita. Ymmärrän itseäni, mutta en heitä. Luulisi, että koska olen ihminen, jos ymmärrän itseäni, ymmärtäisin myös heitä. Mutta kukaan ei näytä ymmärtävän toisiaan, ja kaikki näyttävät ymmärtävän minua vielä vähemmän.
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Santosh Kalwar (Kaikkea vastustava seura)
“
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Instead: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
Why Swift's dreary satire is routinely inflicted on high school English classes is a mystery to me. Tristram Shandy at least has the virtue of occasionally being funny. It's also deeply weird: postmodern 200 years before postmodernism, with a deeply unreliable narrator, typographic trickery (a death early in the book is followed by a solid-black page), and a list of character names that would make Pynchon jealous (Dr. Slop, Billy Le Fever, and a certain Hafen Slawkenbergius).
It is an important achievement in the history of the novel, a reminder that literature is an ongoing experiment—which means you should treat it like Don Quixote and read the first half before calling it a day. One can admire the pyramids without feeling the need to scale them.
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Christopher Cox
“
This. This is great literature. It’s not highbrow or intellectual, but it’s an experience. It makes the reader live and breathe and cry and mourn the losses of its characters before they celebrate the victories. It touches on passion and personal poignancy. There’s a reason romance is one of the most popular genres in the world, whether snooty-falooty people want to believe it or not.
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Max Monroe (Accidental Attachment (It's A Funny Story #1))
“
This is the part where we should have exchanged glances (from what I had gathered from my limited literature recollection, it added dramatic flair), but I was too intrigued by the staircase, and where it led, to look anywhere else.
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Finn Eccleston (The Community: A Funny and Disturbing Conspiracy Mystery Novel (Project M Book 1))
“
This book has been so much fun to write, I have loved getting to know my animal characters even better!
This is a festival not to be missed its brimming with lots of doggy and cat fun
My favourite game is the grooviest shaker competition what will yours be?
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christine skippins
“
She seemed sad and wise beyond her years. All the giddy experimentation with sex, recreational drugs, and revolutionary politics that was still approaching its zenith in countercultural America was ancient, unhappy history to her. Actually, her mother was still in the midst of it—her main boyfriend at the time was a Black Panther on the run from the law—but Caryn, at sixteen, was over it. She was living in West Los Angeles with her mother and little sister, in modest circumstances, going to a public high school. She collected ceramic pigs and loved Laura Nyro, the rapturous singer-songwriter. She was deeply interested in literature and art, but couldn’t be bothered with bullshit like school exams. Unlike me, she wasn’t hedging her bets, wasn’t keeping up her grades to keep her college options open. She was the smartest person I knew—worldly, funny, unspeakably beautiful. She didn’t seem to have any plans. So I picked her up and took her with me, very much on my headstrong terms. I overheard, early on, a remark by one of her old Free School friends. They still considered themselves the hippest, most wised-up kids in L.A., and the question was what had become of their foxy, foulmouthed comrade Caryn Davidson. She had run off, it was reported, “with some surfer.” To them, this was a fate so unlikely and inane, there was nothing else to say. Caryn did have one motive that was her own for agreeing to come to Maui. Her father was reportedly there. Sam had been an aerospace engineer before LSD came into his life. He had left his job and family and, with no explanation beyond his own spiritual search, stopped calling or writing. But the word on the coconut wireless was that he was dividing his time between a Zen Buddhist monastery on the north coast of Maui and a state mental hospital nearby. I was not above mentioning the possibility that Caryn might find him if we moved to the island.
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William Finnegan (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life)
“
Mr. Darcy regains my interest. As if he ever lost it.
“Mmhmm, thanks.” The phone clicks back in its charger. My sister springs up from the floor mummy-style. “That traitor!”
Okay, Darcy, see you later. I close the book. “Who was that?
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Allyson Kennedy (The Crush (The Ballad of Emery Brooks, #1))
“
If someone left you, you had to answer with silence.
She bore the scent of a mixture of oriental spices and the sweetness of flowers and honey.
Dreams are the interface between the worlds, between time and space.
He calls books freedoms. And homes too. They preserve all the good words that we so seldom use.
Tango is a truth drug. It lays bare your problems and your complexes, but also the strengths you hide from others so as not to vex them.
Saudade. It is the sense of being loved in a way that will never come again. It is a unique experience of abandon. It is everything that words cannot capture.
They say that men who are at one with their bodies can sense and smell when a woman wants more from life than she is getting.
Another woman found it incredibly erotic when I backed pate en croute. Aromas do funny things to the soul.
Habit is a vain and treacherous goddess. She lets nothing disrupt her rule. She smothers one desire after another: the desire to travel, the desire for a better job or a new love. She stops us from living as we would like, because habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do.
Books can do many things but not everything. We have to live the important things, not read them.
It was the season for truffles and literature. The countryside was redolent of wild herbs and glowed in autumnal rust reds and wine yellows.
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Nina George (The Little Paris Bookshop)
“
That man behaves so much like the villain in a work of literature, it’s almost funny,” Arsibalt observed. “Yes,” said one of the Hundreders, “it’s as if he’d never heard of foreshadowing.
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Neal Stephenson (Anathem)
“
You want us to take on a job about funny books?”
“They’re graphic novels,” Hardison said in a grave tone. “And it’s a serious art form. They’re the most vibrant format for modern literature. And—and they make freaking great movies. I mean, have you seen The Avengers?
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Matt Forbeck (The Con Job (Leverage, #1))
“
Puns are at their core defined by multiplicity of meaning, not necessarily humor. The common expectation that puns should always be funny, or die in the attempt, is a relatively modern development.
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John Pollack (The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics)
“
The photo I had engraved on Mike’s stone makes me smile. I can only imagine what he’d say about the likes of me today: private investigator. He’d never believe it. Huge difference from when we worked the streets together.I can still hear his voice. “Here, Paul. Taste this.” When I concentrate hard enough, I can still taste that awful cooking of his. If there truly is life after death, I sure hope he’s a better cook now than he was back then. Funny the things you miss after someone you love is gone.
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Joseph Freeman
“
Brock毕业证咨询办理《Q微2026614433》购买Brock毕业证修改Brock成绩单加拿大购买布鲁克大学毕业证办理高仿学位布鲁克大学毕业证成绩单认证出国留学无法毕业买毕业证留学被劝退买毕业证(无法毕业教育部认证咨询) Brock University
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"The mind-frying hilarity of Anthony Veasna So's first book of fiction settles him as the genius of social satire our age needs now more than ever. Few writers can handle firm plot action and wrenching pathos in such elegant prose. This unforgettable new voice is at once poetic and laugh-out-loud funny. These characters kept talking to me long after I closed the book I'm destined to read again and cannot wait to teach. Anthony Veasna So is a shiny new star in literature's firmament and Afterparties his first classic."--Mary Karr, author of Lit: A Memoir
Afterparties weaves through a Cambodian-American community in the shadow of genocide, following the children of refugees as they grapple with the complexities of masculinity, class, and family. Anthony Veasna So explores the lives of these unforgettable characters with bracing humor and startling tenderness. A stunning collection from an exciting new voice.--Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half
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购买Brock毕业证修改Brock成绩单加拿大购买布鲁克大学毕业证办理高仿学位布鲁克大学毕业证成绩单认证出国留学无法毕业买毕业证留学被劝退买毕业证(无法毕业教育部认证咨询)
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The ï⌁ᵶ⎔ctogon8⌁ð
Do not beat your nik,
Or play at fiddlesticks.
Prefix not thy rhetoric
With suffix that transfix.
Play no dirty tricks,
That try to s’nick or nix.
Go the quick route fix–
With things that intermix.
Do not be thick,
Or over politic.
Be ye no sophistahick,
Playin’ smartass in the sticks.
Do not be sad or heartsick,
If your neck has no ies full of hick.
If you are not on the River Styx,
Look alive–give Charon a kick.
If a bad guy has given all the slip,
Be chivalric: use a *sharp stick.
If with a bovine that is lovesick,
She’ll smooch you a wet cowlick.
Light a candlestick:
Let it all brightly click–
[Eighth power of a # ∞8:
≒ ∼ ≓ —be sure well to remember].
Zenzic aside,
Do not panic but abide.
’Tis just a mathematic–
Past the deep end sixth—
It is nothing ’cept a ⇌ ’twixt ⇋.
Quite a simple pick:
Avoid the contradixts–
Choose humble little⌁ Zenzizenzizenzics ⌁—
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Douglas M. Laurent