This is not for you.

tamburina:

“Once one is caught up into the material world, not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

By this I mean the thing…

Mysteries drive us all. We only glimpse their veiled faces, but their power pushes us onward, toward darkness. Or into the light.

—Salman Rushdie, Fury (via llibre)

(via teachingliteracy)

I think people are often quite unaware of their inner selves, their other selves, their imaginative selves, the selves that aren’t on show in the world. It’s something you grow out of from childhood onwards, losing possession of yourself, really. I think literature is one of the best ways back into that. You are hypnotized as soon as you get into a book that particularly works for you, whether it’s fiction or a poem. You find that your defenses drop, and as soon as that happens, an imaginative reality can take over because you are no longer censoring your own perceptions, your own awareness of the world.

—Jeanette Winterson, The Art of Fiction No. 150 (via bookmania)