Category: Quotes

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On The Importance of Literature

“The universe is huge. Time is impossibly vast. Trillions of creatures crawl and swim and fly through our planet. Billions of people live, billions came before us, and billions will come after. We cannot count, cannot even properly imagine, the number of perspectives and variety of experiences offered by existence.

We sip all of this richness through the very narrowest of straws: one lifetime, one consciousness, one perspective, one set of experiences. Of all the universe has, has had, and will have to offer, we can know only the tiniest fraction. We are alone and minuscule and our lives are over in a blink.

All of this strikes me as terribly sad, and if I believed Someone were in charge, I could muster an argument that our awareness of vastness makes our tininess unfair.

But here’s the thing. Literature lets us experience life through a second consciousness. For a time we share the perspective and experience of the author and his imagination. Our experience of the universe is broadened, multiplied.

Without literature, we are all limited to our own lives. With it, we can know something of what it is to be other people, to walk in their shoes, to see the world their way.

Literature needs no further defense than this, I would say. It is our species’s most advanced and successful technology for cheating dismal fate out of the abstract aloneness it would otherwise impose on us.”

From a post on Reddit by OnlyFoolin

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People are not good to each other.

too much
too little
or too late

too fat
too thin
or too bad

laughter or
tears
or immaculate
unconcern

haters
lovers

armies running through streets of pain
waving wine bottles
bayoneting and fucking everyone

or an old guy in a cheap quiet room
with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe.

there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
a clock’s hands.

there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in blinking neon
in Vegas, in Baltimore, in Munich.

people are tired
strafed by life
mutilated either by love or no
love.

we don’t need new governments
new revolutions
we don’t need new men
new women
we don’t need new ways
we just need to care.

people are not good to each other
one on one.
people are just not good to each other.

we are afraid.
we think that hatred signifies
strength.
that punishment is
love.

what we need is less false education
what we need are fewer rules
fewer police
and more good teachers.

we forget the terror of one person
aching in one room
alone
unkissed
untouched
cut off
watering a plant alone
without a telephone that would never
ring
anyway.

people are not good to each other
people are not good to each other
people are not good to each other

and the beads swing and the clouds obscure
and dogs piss upon rose bushes
the killer beheads the child like taking a bite
out of an ice cream cone
while the ocean comes in and goes out
in and out
in the thrall of a senseless moon.

and people are not good to each other.

-Charles Bukowski, Fire