"Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries."
-Frankenstein
Source: Frankenstein
"Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries."
-Frankenstein
I don't want to speak about God, because I am not here to review a book I haven't read entirely.
"Oh for a book and a shady nook."
"I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?"
"Do you think that civilization advances because of things written in books? Not a bit of what is written in books ever got there until after the thought of it happened in someone's mind. Someone first had to collect it from space, or recollect it from its electrical pattern to which he (or she) had been attuned. The book is but a record of what has already happened."
When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of
paper and glue, you sell him a whole new life.
A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.
A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.
Whoever lives for poetry must read everything. How often has the light of a new idea sprung for me from a simple brochure! When one allows himself to be animated by new images, he discovers iridescence in the images of old books. Poetic ages unite in a living memory. The new age awakens the old. The old age comes to live again in the new. Poetry is never as unified as when it diversifies.
The best proof of the specificity of the book is that it is at once a reality of the virtual and a virtuality of the real.
Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.
We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.
