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Quotes & Thinkers in literary activity

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🇫🇷Albert Camus

Literature

continental philosophy

1913–1960

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

"Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape."

55 quotes

🇺🇸Philip K. Dick

Literature

postmodern literature

1928–1982

"But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That’s closer to it. The artistic life without the talent."

"Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it."

"Ah, my friend, one may live in a big house and yet have no comfort."

"[I]n speaking of Italy, romance has omitted for once to exaggerate."

"History is is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse."

"You'll never be able to let him go. You'll always feel wrong about being with me."

"Our civilization … is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it."

"But that is what life is like, uncertain, screwed at times but still fun."

"It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one."

"I'd sell my soul to have you. In my whole life, you'll always be what I wanted most."~ Hardy Cates"

"Was that, then, the way we do things? "Not knowing"— was that the way the most profound things happened? ... Was the secret of never escaping from the greater life the secret of living like a sleepwalker?"

"I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people. Neither is anyone I have ever cared deeply about."

"This book is dedicated to the people of America--strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched."

5 quotes

🇵🇹Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

Literature

1919–2004

"Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen at Poetry International Web"

"Custom and Myth - full text HTML of original work."

"It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it."

"“We cannot have another world war. War is the wrong word. We should ban the term ‘World War III’ and say instead apocalypse or holocaust."

"I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men."

"We only see shadows of reality. We shouldn't expect those shadows to behave sensibly."

"Primo Levi's journeys of peace" by Clive Sinclair TimesOnline"

"I OWE Christianity a debt, and so, I believe, does the world we have lived in for the last 2000 years."

"A soldier has one item that cannot be neglected. His feet. They are his wheels, his mechanised warfare."

"The heart makes its choices without weighing the consequences. It doesn't look ahead to the lonely nights that follow."

"I’m a bit of a lone wolf…I don’t give interviews or do publicity unless I have a book out—too distracting. My desk is where the real work happens."

"In the west, we believe we are the most progressive and socially just, but a lot of that is just a hopeful illusion."

"The sinner must feel far worse before he ever has a right to feel any better."

"Russian ladies, for the most part, cherish only Platonic love, without mingling any thought of matrimony with it; and Platonic love is exceedingly embarrassing."

"Change gear, change gear, check mirror, murder a prostitute, change gear, change gear, murder. That's a lot of effort in a day."

"I wanted to be a poet as a child and I have a wall in my study dedicated to poetry books, all in alphabetical order, that reminds me daily of my failure."

12 quotes

🇫🇷Roland Barthes

semiotic literary criticism

Structuralism

1915–1980

"Roland Barthes and Photography by Ron Burnett"

"Putin must be stopped. And sometimes only guns can stop guns."

"And then I saw the menu, stained with tea and beautifully written by a foreign hand, and on top it said…"Chips with everything". Chips with every damn thing. You breed babies and you eat chips with everything."

"It’s been more difficult for me to come out as a Mexican-American than come out as gay."

"Poetry is the vision in a man's soul which he translates as best he can with all the means at his disposal."

"The kitchen was the United States; the living room was Mexico…One side was struggling with all her might to make me an American boy, and the other side, with all of his might, was trying to keep me a Mexican boy."

5 quotes

🇺🇸Taylor Marshall

Literature

traditionalist Catholicism

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