Literature And Illness Quotes

While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the 'new', which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found. ~ Roberto Bolano

I live to the rhythm of my country and I cannot remain on the sidelines. I want to be here. I want to be part of it. I want to be a witness. I want to walk arm in arm with it. I want to hear it more and more, to cradle it, to carry it like a medal on my chest. Activism is a constant element in my life, even though afterwards I anguish over not having written 'my own things.' Testimonial literature provides evidence of events that people would like to hide, denounces and therefore is political and part of a country in which everything remains to be done and documented. ~ Elena Poniatowska

Psychic health depends on orgastic potency, i.e., upon the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act. It is founded upon the healthy character attitude of the individual's capacity for love. Psychic illnesses are the result of a disturbance of the natural capacity for love. ~ Wilhelm Reich

Now, Jasper, as a great man once said, 'A brave and steadfast heart can overcome any fear.' So don't worry. I'll be back with Benelaius shortly. In the meantime, look about for clues, only don't disturb anything.
[ ... ]
I knew only too well who that great man was whom he spoke of. Camber Fosrick. I had committed the quote to memory as well. So Lindavar, one of the War Wizards of Cormyr, was addicted to trashy literature too. I would have chuckled had I not been so scared. ~ Chet Williamson

Maintaining the thinnest facade of a functioning family that tries to act as others do - plan ahead, drive somewhere, go on holiday, relax - is beyond us. We are smashed. Insecurity jams the gears on every action. Each time we are toppled. I feel a fool over and over again for trying. ~ Marion Coutts

My mind feels like a race car on the track, getting faster and faster every time I pause to think or blink or try to focus on anything. Nothing can keep up to it, not the other cars, not my body, not anyone else in the bar. It's a rush, pure exhilaration, and I'm having the time of my life. But instead of driving, I'm in the passenger seat, along for the ride, watching myself race around the track from my barstool. ~ Shannon Mullen

All of us must do our best to live gracefully in the present moment. I now see depression as akin to being tied to a chair with restraints on my wrists. It took me a long time to realize that I only magnify my distress by struggling for freedom. My pain diminished when I gave up trying to escape completely from it. However, don't interpret my current approach to depression as utterly fatalistic. I do whatever I can to dull depression's pain, while premising my life on its continuing presence. The theologian and philosopher Thomas Moore puts it well with his distinction between cure and care. While cure implies the eradication of trouble, care "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. ~ David A. Karp

In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature. ~ James Payn

Whether we like it or not, if we are to pursue a career in science, eventually we have to learn the "language of nature": mathematics. Without mathematics, we can only be passive observers to the dance of nature rather than active participants. As Einstein once said, "Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas." Let me offer an analogy. One may love French civilization and literature, but to truly understand the French mind, one must learn the French language and how to conjugate French verbs. The same is true of science and mathematics. Galileo once wrote, "[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to understand a single word. ~ Michio Kaku

When I write poetry, I'll write it down, or a tiny bit of it, and then have to depend on the reader to bring his own feelings, moods and memories to the act of reading poetry. And this act is considerable art in itself. To read poetry or literature with attention is a marvelous thing to be able to do - to respond, to live and be moved by this subtle world you've created about you. ~ William Anderson

At no other time or place in human history have social conflicts been so richly diverse, so vigorously articulated, so eloquently manifest in art and literature or adressed with such directness by the political system and the media. ~ Ramachandra Guha

If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play 'The Crucible' analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials. ~ Jane Smiley

Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked. ~ Franz Kafka

Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting. ~ Jonathan Swift

If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don't know what work it is these states are performing within you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where it all comes from and where it is leading? You well know you are in a period of transition and want nothing more than to be transformed. If there is something ailing in the way you go about things, then remember that sickness is the means by which an organism rids itself of something foreign to it. All one has to do is help it to be ill, to have its whole illness and let it break out, for that is how it mends itself. There is so much, my dear Mr Kappus, going on in you now. You must be patient as an invalid and trusting as a convalescent, for you are perhaps both. And more than that: you are also the doctor responsible for looking after himself. But with all illnesses there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And inasfar as you are your own doctor, "this above all is what you must do now. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it. ~ Mark Twain

It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth, literary tops. Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust itself. As a final observation, I should like to add that it is impossible today for anyone to feel innocent, if in whatever we do or say we can discover a hidden motive - that of a white man, or a male, or the possessor of a certain income, or a member of a given economic system, or a sufferer from a certain neurosis - this should not induce in us either a universal sense of guilt or an attitude of universal accusation. When we become aware of our disease or of our hidden motives, we have already begun to get the better of them. What matters is the way in which we accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are - that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being. ~ Italo Calvino

like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse - they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted. ~ James Hannaham

A King Who Keeps To Himself Dwells"

A king who keeps to himself dwells
in a humble house with his sole servant.
While his body-man eats, drinks, feels fever
and chills, and plucks gray hairs from his head,
his master knows nothing of thirst or hunger,
illness or age. They set out together, but whether
fortune or misfortune awaits them on the world's
wide road depends on the servant's whim, faithful
or unfaithful to his king. Along the way, a kinswoman,
mother and sister to them both, offers them a room,
a mean, but the soon press on, until the old servant
can go no farther. He stumbles, falls, and cannot
rise again. Then the king, without a glance backward,
continues on to a country we shall all come to know.
Whoever knows this pair, say their names.

(and the answer is body and soul) ~ Elizabeth Spires

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them. ~ Henry David Thoreau

One function of the librarian, as he saw it, was to blunt the edge of these differences and to provide a means whereby the rich and poor could live happily side by side. The public library was a great leveler, supplying a literature by which the ordinary man could experience some of the pleasures of the rich, and providing a common ground where employer and employee could meet on equal terms. ~ Lewis Henry Steiner

My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching. ~ Azar Nafisi

There is always the question why
And there is always life,
Which doesn't need an answer. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

I think a lot of people see the flu as a common cold, but it's not: it's a serious respiratory illness that could lead to hospitalization and the young are extremely vulnerable. ~ Tia Mowry

The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship. ~ George Packer

He Said...

Your garden at dusk
Is the soul of love
Blurred in its beauty
And softly caressing;
I, gently daring
This sweetest confessing,
Say your garden at dusk
Is your soul, My Love. ~ Anne Spencer

If there is ever a word of criticism of America, it is of the most muted kind. ~ J.M. Coetzee

I think the idea that the systemic problems in a society lead to illness is important to know. We shouldn't be separating out how we live with where we live, and what ails us with the environment we're in. ~ Claudia Rankine

It is a good idea to take a multivitamin, fish oil and a mineral supplement while you do not understand why your health is failing, as it may help to delay progression of illness, disease and death. ~ Steven Magee

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born. ~ Salman Rushdie

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being. ~ Paul De Man

I used to think she was quite intelligent , in my stupidity. The reason I did was because she knew quite a lot about the theater and plays and literature and all that stuff. If somebody knows quite a lot about all those things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they're really stupid or not. ~ J.D. Salinger

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page. ~ Guillermo Cabrera Infante

As Borges himself showed us in so many stories - "The Aleph", "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Gift", "Blue Tigers", "Shakespeare's Memory" - a blessing is always a mixed blessing.
As Borges noted sadly, he inherited a library, and blindness; we who study Borges inherit great sight, yet the rest of the library somehow fades.

(pg 303, "What I Lost When I Translated Jorge Luis Borges") ~ Andrew Hurley

I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out. ~ Carl Sandburg

I think about all the people who have created something that lives after them - works of art, plays, music, films, literature, poetry that will be read, seen, performed, and heard for the rest of time. If I could do something that lives after me, then I think I will have had a life well led. ~ Seamus Dever

So what exactly does it mean to be a late bloomer? Simply put, a late bloomer is a person who fulfills their potential later than expected; they often have talents that aren't visible to others initially... And they fulfill their potential frequently in novel and unexpected ways, surprising even those closest to them. They are not attempting to satisfy, with gritted teeth, the expectations of their parents or society, a false path that leads to burnout and brittleness, or even to depression and illness... Late bloomers are those who find their supreme destiny on their own schedule, in their own way. ~ Rich Karlgaard

When you start searching for 'pure elements' in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:

Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.

The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.

The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn't do the job quite as well.

Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is 'healthy'. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante's time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare's time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how.

Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn't really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn't be considered as 'great men' or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.

The starters of crazes.
Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able 'to see the wood for the trees'. He may know what he 'likes'. He may be a 'compleat book-lover', with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, ~ Ezra Pound

For centuries, no one was concerned that books weren't girl-friendly, because no one really cared if girls read; but even so, we persisted for long enough that literature has slowly come to accommodate us. Modern boys, by contrast, are not trying to read in a culture of opposition. Nobody is telling them reading doesn't matter, that boys don't need to read and that actually, no prospective wife looks for literacy in a husband. Quite the opposite! Male literary culture thrives, both teachers and parents are throwing books at their sons, and the fact that the books aren't sticking isn't, as the nature of the complaint makes clear, because boys don't like reading – no. The accusation is that boys don't like reading about girls, which is a totally different matter.

Because constantly, consistently, our supposedly equal society penalises boys who express an interest in anything feminine. The only time boys are discouraged from books all together is in contexts where, for whatever reason, they've been given the message that reading itself is girly – which is a wider extrapolation of the same problem. ~ Foz Meadows

I have been dealing with illness and its manifestations since I was a teenager, and I think that gives me a very healthy respect for the things in life we can't control. ~ Katherine Boo

In these days when anything goes in literature, movies, and even TV, to think there are some places so isolated, so backward, so ill-informed as to what's going on in the world ~ W.P. Kinsella

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive. ~ Seneca The Younger

I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels ... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature. ~ Seth Grahame-Smith

The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will glow with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own doctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Liberty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limbs that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged with anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows: sublime and yet so simple. ~ Victor Hugo

Not ill? No truly, I am young, healthful, and strong; the blood flows freely in my veins; my limbs obey my will; I am robust in mind and body, constituted for a long life. Yes, all this is true; and yet, nevertheless, I have an illness, a fatal illness,
an illness given by the hand of man! ~ Victor Hugo

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses. Is there any other period in your life when you hate your best friend on Monday and love them again on Tuesday? But at eight, 10, 12, you don't realise you're going to die. There is always the possibility of escape. There is always somewhere else and far away, a fact I had never really appreciated until I read Gitta Sereny's profoundly unsettling Cries Unheard about child-killer Mary Bell.
At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We begin to picture a time when there will no longer be somewhere else and far away. We have jobs, children, partners, debts, responsibilities. And if many of these things enrich our lives immeasurably, those shrinking limits are something we all have to come to terms with.
This, I think, is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks. ~ Mark Haddon

Had I not gone to Japan in 1986, had I stayed home and majored in English literature as I'd intended to do, I might indeed have become an investment banker, an outcome that perhaps would have proved a more severe blow to the health of the U.S. economy than to the history of the novel. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

One touch can say more than all the world's words, that's true, but the touch fades with the years and then we need words again, they're our weapons against time, death, forgetfulness, unhappiness. ~ Jon Kalman Stefansson