"Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs……" — Francis Spufford
"Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be."
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Francis Spufford
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20 Quotes by Francis Spufford
Francis Spufford has 20 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we…
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God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.
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Taking the things people do wrong seriously is part of taking them seriously. It’s part of letting their actions have…
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Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.
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Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending - pretending that…
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If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity…
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The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever…
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If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the…
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I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence,…
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When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to…
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You never came out the way you came in.
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What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the…
See all 20 quotes by Francis Spufford »
More Behind Quotes
This quote is filed under Behind Quotes,
one of 6,713 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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The structure of apartheid is still rooted in the Haitian society. When you have apartheid, you don't see those behind…
— Jean-Bertrand Aristide
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I don't want to lie. I dislike dishonesty. And I work in Hollywood, a town and a business that relies…
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I've had trouble now and again in Nigeria because I have spoken up about the mistreatment of factions in the…
— Chinua Achebe
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You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that hasn't come…
— Margaret Atwood
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For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.
— Irving Babbitt
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Basically no, I mean I think that it's very easy to like I say, smoke a joint or even to…
— Lester Bangs
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I almost died, secretly, behind closed doors.
— Stephen Baldwin
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I don't get it when you get so much openness about the way movies are made, and the special effects…
— Christian Bale
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Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
— Honore de Balzac
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I'm not such a big star. I am just a little planet. In Spain, people don't put so much attention…
— Antonio Banderas
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I think we are living in selfish times. I'm the first one to say that I'm the most selfish. We…
— Javier Bardem
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All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves.
— Amelia Barr
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