353 Quotes About Literary-fiction

There is no such thing as being “more desperate” than someone else. You either are or you aren't.

I carried the tree into the front room where cloves had punctured the skin of oranges and I could see where you had been only minutes before. Your indent was still warm on the sofa with a book open to its side, a table with an empty plate, a cardigan, and the slow fade of a fire.

The whole history of literary fiction as an evolutionary process may be said to be a gradual probing of deeper and deeper layers of life.

...swollen and perfectly round, and large, radiating knives of light...It hung and trembled slightly like a viscous drop about to fall.

We are all terrified, John. There is no mystery to it. If you weren't terrified, there would be something wrong with you...I'll tell you what matters. How you hold yourself is what fucken matters.

This is long and I will stop. But mostly, I am sad at the ways misogyny is embedded in the literary landscape like the roots of a tree, extending everywhere invisibly below the surface and too often breaking through.

the purportedly lethal final cartridge was nothing more than a classic illustration of the antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism

If I have no need for you, I have no use for you.

Now that I could hear this woman’s song—a melody that told a story I couldn’t understand—I hoped with all of my heart that it wasn’t too late.