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Books Quote by James Wood

“Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in…” quote by James Wood — Download Open image

““Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.””

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“There is this strangeness of a life story having no shape—or more accurately, nothing but its present—until it has its ending; and then suddenly…

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“Everything has always been permitted, even when God was around. God has nothing to do with it.”

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“Melville, in his relation to belief, was like the last guest who cannot leave the party; he was always returning to see if he…

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“When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I…

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“Life, then will, always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need:…

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“Kazuo Ishiguro, the New Nobel Laureate, Has Supremely Done His Own Kind of Thing”

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“fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.”

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“This is merely another definition of dramatic irony: to see through a character’s eyes while being encouraged to see more than the character can…

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“The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of…

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“They believed that this world was fallen but that restitution would be provided elsewhere, in an afterlife. I believed that this world was fallen…

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“Even the apparently unreliable narrator is more often than not reliably unreliable. Think of Kazuo Ishiguro’s butler in The Remains of the Day, or…

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“Fiction is most effective when its themes are unspoken. An ideal fiction has a kind of thematic ghostliness, whereby the novel marks its meanings…

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