"What is literature, and why do I try……" — M. John Harrison
"What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I’m reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world."
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M. John Harrison
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14 Quotes by M. John Harrison
M. John Harrison has 14 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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After all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you…
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Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then…
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Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the…
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Perception of a state is not the state.
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Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised…
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At Birkin Grif's left, his seat insecure on a scruffy packhorse, Theomeris Glyn, his only armour a steel-stressed leather cap,…
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I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape. After you grow up, you should start reading for…
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SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy…
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Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.
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Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison.
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Egnaro is a secret known to everyone but yourself. It is a country or a city to which you have…
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Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go…
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More All Quotes
This quote is filed under All Quotes,
one of 128,558 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally…
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No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our…
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The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all…
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The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes…
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Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of…
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We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and…
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I keep my friends as misers do their treasure, because, of all the things granted us by wisdom, none is…
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We must all make peace so that we can all live in peace.
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The spirit of Ubuntu, that once led Haiti to emerge as the first independent black nation in 1804, helped Venezuela,…
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As we all know, many people remain buried under tons of rubble and debris, waiting to be rescued. When we…
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Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.
— Aristophanes
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A friend to all is a friend to none.
— Aristotle
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