Wendy Lesser famous quotes

Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different,
-- Wendy Lesser

#Reading #Literature #Way

We turn to literature to remedy the loss, to impose some kind of meaningful order on the nonsequential.
-- Wendy Lesser

#Meaningful #Loss #Order

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.
-- Wendy Lesser

#Self #Voice #Greek

I suppose if I had to give a one-word answer to the question of why I read, that word would be pleasure. The kind of pleasure you can get from reading is like no other in the world.
-- Wendy Lesser

#Reading #Giving #Answers

I think I was born with a sense of instantaneous connection between the things I perceived in the world and my feelings about those things my character has served me well it has made me. well, an eighteenth -century man of letters, though one who happens to be female and lives in twentieth-century Berkeley.
-- Wendy Lesser

#Character #Men #Thinking

The solution to the novel's legal problem is a satisfyingly intricate one, and nobody will want his money back on the plot. But the echoes that will remain in your mind after you've finished Reversible Errors will mainly have to do with the novel's other elements.
-- Wendy Lesser

#Echoes #Errors #Mind

Half-truths can be more pernicious than outright falsehoods.
-- Wendy Lesser

#Lying #Half #Half Truth

He [Hemingway] used a stand-up work place he had fashioned out of the top of of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition

Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.

To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.

A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.

Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.

For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience.

Absurdly improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak literature.

Whoever is new to power is always harsh.

In the last stage of the spiritual master's life, the devotees of the spiritual master should take preaching activities into their own hands. In this way the spiritual master can sit down in a solitary place and render nirjana-bhajana.