LitReactor: the supplemental material

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.

Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens. (via ablogwithaview)

The Victorian novel is the heir of the Elizabethan drama

The Content of the Modern Novel (1906), Louise Collier Willcox
(via bellusisterror)

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful

David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish (via bookmania)

Keep a guard over your eyes and ears as the inlets of your heart, and over your lips as the outlet, lest they betray you in a moment of unwariness. Receive, coldly and dispassionately, every attention, till you have ascertained and duly considered the worth of the aspirant; and let your affections be consequent upon approbation alone. First study; then approve; then love.

Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (via bookmania)

We are not quite novels.
We are not quite short stories.
In the end, we are collected works.

Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
(via theliteraryjournals)

If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilised discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up.

Anthony Burgess, A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (via provst)

She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (via a-witches-brew)

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life
(via austinkleon)

Fiction suddenly became this place where I could write about all my desires, but nobody would have to pay a price for it. Nobody would be unhappy if I would eat five desserts or punch the people who deserved punching or kiss the people who deserved to be kissed, you know? So there was something very liberating about it. Fiction became this kind of padded cell where I could run and hit my head against the wall without kind of causing any harm—not to the wall and neither to my head.

Etgar Keret (NPR, 2016)

Posts tagged quotes