“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.”
“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
“It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”
“There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”
“Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.”
“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.”
“We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”
“We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.”
“If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?”
“We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.”
“Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.”
“It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.”
“Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'.”
“A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish.”
“Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.”
“I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story."
Oh. my. word. These are beautiful and amazing. I want all of them on my wall.
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