Vulnerable Literary Quotes

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas. - Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993

She had responded to the loss of her husband, to poverty, to disease, and to family cruelty with boldness and ingenuity, by opening herself to others, especially to her children and her Church, pouring into these precious vessels her knowledge, hope, and devotion.

She senses your vulnerability, and reassures that every dream you’ve ever whispered in the night, or secret desires you dared not speak, are all within the palm of her hand

Which three authors, dead or alive, would you invite to a literary dinner party? is a question often asked of authors interviewed for The New York Times Book Review. What Edmund White said James Merrill said about a young fan: “Why does he want to meet us in the flesh? Doesn’t he realize the best part of us is on the page and all he’ll be meeting is an empty hive?

Tess is not simply presented as a passive victim, however. Throughout the novel she is shown as experiencing tension between the intractable materiality of the social and economic world in which she has to live, and her extraordinarily vulnerable, sensitive self. Hardy is particularly interested in the nature of her consciousness, and in the intense subjectivity of her experience.

When the School of Resentment becomes as dominant among art historians and critics as it is among literary academics, will Matisse go unattended while we all flock to view the daubings of the Guerrilla Girls? The lunacy of these questions is plain enough when it comes to the eminence of Matisse, while Stravinsky is clearly in no danger of being replaced by politically correct music for the ballet companies of the world. Why then is literature so vulnerable to the onrush of our contemporary social idealists?

Libraries are, at heart, helpful and kind providers. It is hard for those who perhaps don't feel the need to visit their local libraries to understand what a vital service they provide for communities and individuals who do - and those who do are often the most vulnerable.

The setting, concerns, and mood of The Woodlanders are consonant with the Wessex of the earlier novels. There is an element of nostalgia in Hardy’s treatment of the woodlands of Little Hintock. Although such rural economies were very much alive in Hardy’s day, he strikes an elegiac note in his evocation of a world that will inevitably pass away. However, the woodlands do not form the backdrop to an idyllic pastoral of humanity living in tranquil harmony with nature. The trees, which are such a dominant presence in the novel, compete with each other for nourishment and light, are vulnerable to disease and damage, and are frightening in their moaning under the lash of the storm. The woodlands represent the Darwinian struggle for existence that Hardy sees as extending not only to the inhabitants of this little world but also beyond ...

The problem may be a literary one: we are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives. We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower — and wither — all around us. Even those who live out the best version of the familiar story line might not find happiness as their reward. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I know a woman who was lovingly married for seventy years. She has had a long, meaningful life that she has lived according to her principles. But I wouldn’t call her happy; her compassion for the vulnerable and concern for the future have given her a despondent worldview. What she has had instead of happiness requires better language to describe. There are entirely different criteria for a good life that might matter more to a person — honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope.

She knew the effort it took to keep one’s exterior self together, upright, when everything inside was in pieces, broken beyond repair. One touch, one warm, compassionate hand, could shatter that hard-won perfect exterior. And then it would take years and years to restore it. This tiny, effeminate creature dressed in velvet suits, red socks, an absurdly long scarf usually wrapped around his throat, trailing after him like a coronation robe. He who pronounced, after dinner, “I’m going to go sit over here with the rest of the girls and gossip!” This pixie who might suddenly leap into the air, kicking one foot out behind him, exclaiming, “Oh, what fun, fun, fun it is to be me! I’m beside myself!” “Truman, you could charm the rattle off a snake,” Diana Vreeland pronounced. Hemingway - He was so muskily, powerfully masculine. More than any other man she’d met, and that was saying something when Clark Gable was a notch in your belt. So it was that, and his brain, his heart—poetic, sad, boyish, angry—that drew her. And he wanted her. Slim could see it in his hungry eyes, voraciously taking her in, no matter how many times a day he saw her; each time was like the first time after a wrenching separation. How to soothe and flatter and caress and purr and then ignore, just when the flattering and caressing got to be a bit too much. Modesty bores me. I hate people who act coy. Just come right out and say it, if you believe it—I’m the greatest. I’m the cat’s pajamas. I’m it! He couldn’t humiliate her vulnerability, her despair. Old habits die hard. Particularly among the wealthy. And the storytellers, gossips, and snakes. Is it truly a scandal? A divine, delicious literary scandal, just like in the good old days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald? The loss of trust, the loss of joy; the loss of herself. The loss of her true heart. An amusing, brief little time. A time before it was fashionable to tell the truth, and the world grew sordid from too much honesty. In the end as in the beginning, all they had were the stories. The stories they told about one another, and the stories they told to themselves. Beauty. Beauty in all its glory, in all its iterations; the exquisite moment of perfect understanding between two lonely, damaged souls, sitting silently by a pool, or in the twilight, or lying in bed, vulnerable and naked in every way that mattered. The haunting glance of a woman who knew she was beautiful because of how she saw herself reflected in her friend’s eyes. The splendor of belonging, being included, prized, coveted. What happened to Truman Capote. What happened to his swans. What happened to elegance. What truly was the price they paid, for the lives they lived. For there is always a price. Especially in fairy tales.

When words possessing a high degree of terroristic menace become desemanticized in a ritualized literary culture, they not only cease to mean what they had meant, but also lose common elements of meaning, which become unstable and easily replaceable; then all the speakers of this ideological language become extremely vulnerable; the drifting ideological meanings harbor mortal danger.

First they told me: “build a following and the industry will follow.” So I spent my entire 20s building a following on zero budget, getting by on donations. Then they told me: “You need a literary agent. But a literary agent wants to see you have a following and something big going on.” So I started my own small press and self published 5 books and spent day and night connecting with my people until I’d sold over 35,000 copies in 35 different countries and now they tell me: “no agent wants to work with a self published author.” Sometimes I feel like I was doomed from the very start, the very day I sat my food on that plane to London 12 years ago. Like the whole world keeps saying “you can fight all you want but we won’t let you in.” But I do have freedom and I do have my following and I have vulnerable souls writing to me on Friday nights, about loss and hope and how my books or music or words played a small part in something they went through and sometimes I think I would throw all that away just to have a literary agent and a management and the contracts and headlines… because I’m tired.. of always fighting uphill.. but then I get that message, on a Monday night, and I take my computer to a bar close to where I live in Berlin, high above the city, and I write like never before because I have my people and vulnerable souls to find and I have so many books in me and time is not endless, time is crucial, and lately I’ve felt it running out, some nights, so I’m writing another book that won’t be noticed by the agents but I have my people and that’s all I will care about from now on. My people and my freedom, with time running out. That’s what I will focus on.

Violence and beauty are intrinsically linked. It’s people, regular humans making choices in systems, in unknowing collaboration with time, that change the world. Not spirits of the forest or an all seeing god or saints or fairy stories, just regular folk. Pentiment seems to ask, again and again, why isn't this enough? The beautiful, natural world and the people within it. Why diminish us with cheap myths and gods when we are all here. Why can't we be enough. Regular folk loving and hating and bickering and caring and trying. Always trying. Which is all any of us can do. Try to live. Try to live well.

And that’s courage for the next time. And the next time. And inch by inch, you drag yourself back. Mend the knife-marks until they’re silver scars. Mop the floors until the tiles are not longer stained, and you do that once a fortnight now, because their shitty off-whiteness that collects far too much dirt and dust won’t beat you. You fix the small bits, one at a time. When you look back, you see the trail of black, oozing sick that you’ve tracked from the pit, all the way to here. It’s been a long, brutal journey. And yet, looking around, you’re shoulder to shoulder with your people, who have the same tools and same luck as you. You beat the odds, inch by inch. You haven’t won, not really, there’s no such thing, but you’re alive. You get to keep going.

Above all, we share the silence. The moment in the small hours once the woman in the hoodie has hung up the phone and gone inside. The minutes after the couple a few blocks over retire, their argument stowed, mistaking accord for reconciliation. When the record reaches its end, and Mister Withers spins down - may he never be forgotten. When all the cars are safe in their homes and all the people are safe in their ports.

You don’t have to save the world to make a difference, sometimes you just have to get up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other. And accept that things are not the way you want. You can’t undo the end of the world. You can’t magic yourself to a different city. You can’t fix things with grand gestures. But you can wake up and move the dial a little each day. That’s all any of us can do: put the weight on our shoulders, secure the package, and get going.

By imagining ourselves as rational beings, we welcome vulnerable to malformed affections and habits. When we deny the reality of our social modes of reasoning, we become caught up in mindless swarms: trying to become a community of rational thinkers, we become a swarm of atomized, emoters.

[Chesterfield] introduced an ethical question that Americans continue to grapple with: Is it okay to say one thing while believing another? Or to put it another way: What's more important, honesty or politeness? Lionel Trilling, the literary critic, picked up on this question in 1972 when he published /Sincerity and Authenticity/, in which he defines two distinct terms that he believed Americans had conflated. He describes sincerity as the "congruence between avowal and actual feeling." A sincere work is literature is one in which the author seeks to convey exactly what she's thinking-- your comfort be damned. Authenticity, meanwhile, is a matter of personal integrity: you know what you're being authentic, even if other people don't. It's a virtue that puts little stock in what other people think and instead emphasizes determination and self-awareness. Using this parlance, Chesterfield urged his son to be authentic but never sincere. He wanted his son to be purposeful when he chose to imitate someone. "I would much rather have the assent of your reason to my advice than the submission of your will to my authority. This, I will persuade myself, will happen," he wrote Phillip. He hoped that Phillip would learn to calibrate his behavior in service of his goals. But sincerity, for Chesterfield, was for chumps. He instructed his son to never share his true feelings or thoughts, to never appear vulnerable or emotional. There is no need for sincerity if you have no self to begin with. And Chesterfield had no self, only a resume.

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.

Has anyone else noticed how strange the world is becoming?” asked Salman Rushdie in a speech at the PEN America Literary Gala in 2004. We are now a world that is defined by continuous disaster. And Beckett was right. Eloquence about disaster will not do.