Literature Decay Quotes

Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world ... the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art. ~ Asti Hustvedt

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts. ~ Ezra Pound

I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch one. But my honest self revolted at this, hated me for doing this. Sick with conflict, destructive negative emotions, frozen into disintegration I was, refusing to articulate, to spew forth these emotions - they festered in me, growing big, distorted, like pus-bloated sores. Small problems, mentions of someone else's felicity, evidence of someone else's talents, frightened me, making me react hollowly, fighting jealousy, envy, hate. Feeling myself fall apart, decay, rot, and the laurels wither and fall away, and my past sins and omissions strike me with full punishment and import. All this, all this foul, gangrenous, sludge ate away at my insides. Silent, insidious. ~ Sylvia Plath

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you. ~ Harold Bloom

I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me. ~ Ralph Ellison

Every man's memory is his private literature. ~ Aldous Huxley

The most appealing part is the feeling of learning something true - the pleasure of a truth. For me, that's mostly found in philosophical literature at the moment. ~ Eyvind Kang

Literature helps us transcend ourselves. ~ Mohsin Hamid

Because glamour mythically opposes death and decay its ideal model of perfection is youth. The features of youth dictate many of the facets of glamour's criteria. Small snub noses, fair hair, smooth featureless skin, innocence, Picturing youth as a target of sexual lust inevitably encourages the sexual abuse of children. ~ Stefan Szczelkun

If one discards the Bible as being unreliable, then he must discard almost all literature of antiquity. ~ Josh McDowell

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them. ~ Samuel Butler

The press is the exclusive literature of the million; to them it is literature, church, and college. ~ Wendell Phillips

When you write a story, don't just write it - live it;
When putting words into the mouth of a protagonist (or any character) imagine yourself saying them and while writing about the reaction of the listener, write it the way you would react.
Let the conversations not be meant merely to be read but felt as well.
If you do not feel what you write; how can you expect the readers to feel it? ~ Arti Honrao

Today there is a division between those who write about literature and those who create it. I, obviously, don't think that should be there. ~ Alistair MacLeod

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life? ~ Aldous Huxley

It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves ~ Arthur Miller

Literature not only breaks the rules, but makes us realize that there are none. ~ Francine Prose

By the time we were knit in our mothers' wombs, our lives were like open books before Him
every sentence read, every paragraph indented, every chapter titled, every page numbered. He knew it all in advance
all the sin, all the selfishness, every weakness. Yet He chose to love us
lavishly. ~ Beth Moore

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself. ~ Elbert Hubbard

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. ~ Anais Nin

Of everything
I have ever endured,

Y
O
U

are
My Favourite Tragedy. ~ Meraaqi

a novelist's work is often a strategy (I don't mean the author need be aware of this) for dealing with some personal dilemma. Not just that the dilemma is "worked out" in the narrative, as critics often tell us, but that the acts of writing and publishing and positioning oneself in the world of literature are all part of an attempt to find a solution, however provisional, to some deep personal unease. ~ Tim Parks

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Civilization is the making of civil persons. ~ John Ruskin

People always seem to assume that we have a full, back-up support team - make-up, costume and a driver - but usually, in a war zone, there's only me and the cameraman. ~ Kate Adie

But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people's stories, other people's books, other people's words, the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people's stories and books. ~ Orhan Pamuk

They speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement ... ~ Isabel Wilkerson

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth. ~ Edward Dahlberg

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
--Hamlet (I, v, 106) ~ William Shakespeare

I had huge ambition for literature. I don't see the point of doing anything if you don't have ambition for it. ~ Jeanette Winterson

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier. ~ Howard Nemerov