Becomes Quotes (page 245)
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The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject...
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron...
J. R. R. Tolkien
...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.
Doug Coupland
I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I've become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I'm not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It's like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.
John Fowles
The Ripe FigNow that You live here in my chest, anywhere we sit is a mountaintop. And those other images, which have enchanted peoplelike porcelain dolls from China, which have made men and women weepfor centuries, even those have changed now. What used to be pain is a lovely benchwhere we can rest under the roses. A left hand has become a right. A dark wall, a window. A cushion in a shoe heel, the leader of the community! Now silence. What we sayis poison to someand nourishing to others....
Rumi
The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.
Chinua Achebe
...is there any body of citizens in the country who actually welcome and enjoy a General Election?..YES. Those citizens are schoolchildren...attending national schools. It may be very cynical, but on the appointed day those Lyceums of lower learning are turned into polling stations, the homes of innocence temporarily become part of the grim apparatus of politics and the scheming of sundry chancers.
Flann O'Brien