eicats!

Tags: Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass Literature aspire to be and do
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“ Tornadoes uncurling from the sky, whiskey burning down our throats. Catfish sandwiches and hushpuppies eaten at a check-cloth table at a country store. Thickets of poison ivy. Dead dogs and opposums. Meth-head run-ins. Washed-out roads and downed trees. Late night yarns about bloodkin revenge. Just another few days with Daniel Woodrell.

— Benjamin Percy, via Facebook

Tags: writing literature writers daniel woodrell benjamin percy desolate livin' down south awesomeness too much amazing for me to handle
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“ We might say that throughout the centuries two opposite tendencies have competed in literature: one tries to make the language into a weightless element that hovers above things like a cloud or better, perhaps, the finest dust or, better still, a field of magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the weight, density, and concreteness of things, bodies, and sensations.

— ‘Lightness,’ Six Memos for the Next Millenium by Italo Calvino

Tags: italo calvino literature writing language words
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harmlessbalderdash asked: what's the one book, if you had to choose one, you feel you absolutely still need to read before you die? (something that already exists.)

After much thought, consideration and weighing my initial gut reactions, I would have to go with Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings. Its poetry, language, history, and cultural significance are all of great interest and I feel of all the classics and books I know of, this is the one I’d be remiss to not read before I die.

Tags: books literature literary persia poetry

“ The winter sun, poor ghost of itself, hung milky and wan behind layers of cloud above the huddled roofs of the town. In the gabled streets it was wet and windy and there came in gusts a sort of soft hail, not ice, not snow.

— The first passage in Thomas Mann’s short story “Tonio Kroger.”

Tags: winter literature thomas mann books quotes
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“ you cannot hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. i don’t care what they say about e-books. a computer does not smell. there are two perfumes in a book: a book is new, it smells great; a book is old, it smells even better. it smells like ancient Egypt. so a book has got to smell. you have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. you put it in your pocket and you walk around with it. and it stays with you forever.

—

ray bradbury, on books. i believe mr. b and i share some similar thoughts on books, only he manages to phrase it much more elegantly. (via elleneichner)

Ellen, you say it with elegance, too, of the heart.

Tags: books literature quotes e-books
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I get (ish) it. I pumped my swing at six
so hard my sneakers toed the sky. You
know, don’t you, what happened next—after the swing set’s stiff legs
rocked thrice—but before I hit the ground—
I flew.
(from “Say You Waved: A Dream Song Cycle,” Unmentionables, by Beth Ann Fennelly)

I get (ish) it. I pumped my swing at six

so hard my sneakers toed the sky. You

know, don’t you, what happened next—after the swing set’s stiff legs

rocked thrice—but before I hit the ground—

I flew.

_{(from “Say You Waved: A Dream Song Cycle,” Unmentionables, by Beth Ann Fennelly)}

Tags: poetry literature i flew beth ann fennelly childhood freedom

This lovely hardcover edition of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter showed up at the store. It’s a facsimile of the original 1940 1st edition. If I can’t afford an original copy, I’ll take it’s lesser twin. It’s still pretty darn cool.

Tags: books literature awesome

Neuro-Lit-Wit

Thank You Jeeves Wodehouse

“Writing my stories I enjoy. It is the thinking them out that is apt to blot the sunshine from my life. You can’t think out plots like mine without getting a suspicion from time to time that something has gone seriously wrong with the brain’s two hemispheres and the broad band of transversely running fibres known as the corpus collosum.”

(P.G. Wodehouse in the preface to Thank You, Jeeves)

Tags: books jeeves wodehouse literature writing

“ Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
And Wilderness is Paradise now.

— XI, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Tags: literature poetry persia