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Category: modernism
Quotes of Category: modernism
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  1. Virginia Woolf _ To the Lighthouse

    Yet she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile and inhumane than love; yet it is also absolutely beautiful and necessary.
    book-quoteloveliferelationships

  2. Peter Watson _ A Terrible Beauty: The People

    One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been.
    book-quoteinnovationmodernism

  3. Sarah Vowell _ Take the Cannoli

    We all grew up, those of us who took to heart. We came to cringe a little at our old favorite poet, concluding that God was likely never Pooh Bear, that sometimes New York and California could be just as isolated as our provincial hometown, and that grown men didn't run back and forth all the time bleeding soup and sympathy out of sucker women. But those are just details, really. We got what we needed, namely a passion for unlikely words, the willingness to improvise, a distrust of authority, and a sentimental attachment to a certain America...."
    book-quotekerouacmodernismon-the-road

  4. Ray Bradbury _ Fahrenheit 451

    We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy,Something's missing!
    book-quotemodernism

  5. Joseph Conrad _ Lord Jim

    They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
    book-quotemodernismjoseph-conradlord-jim

  6. Samuel Beckett _ Waiting for Godot

    ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?VLADIMIR: {impatiently}. Yes, yes, we're magicians. But let us persevere in what we have resolved, before we forget.
    book-quotemodernismsamuel-beckettenglish-theatre

  7. Paul Bowles _ The Spider's House

    Every little thing makes a difference, whether you decide it yourself or whether it's pure accident. So many people have had the whole course of their lives changed by something perfectly simple like, let's say, crossing the street at one point instead of another.""Yes, yes, yes, I know," Stenham said with exaggerated weariness. "As far as I'm concerned that's just as boring, and a lot more false, by the way. The point I'm trying to make is that he loves his world of Koranic law because it's his, and at the same time he hates it because his intuition tells him it's at the end of its rope. He can't expect anything more from it. And our world, he hates that too, just on general principles, and yet it's his only hope, the only way out-if there is one for him personally, which I doubt.
    book-quotecultureway-of-lifekoran

  8. Paul Bowles _ The Spider's House

    Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything was dying. Like a flame under a glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.
    book-quotemeaningmeaninglessnessexistence

  9. Saul Bellow _ Herzog

    For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You-you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.
    book-quotesciencemachinerymodernism

  10. Haruki Murakami _ South of the Border, West of

    I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain.Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed-maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I'd hit rock bottom, and I knew it.
    book-quotenovelpsychologyjapan

  11. Milan Kundera _ The Art of the Novel

    Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think." That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.
    book-quoteexistentialismtolstoyepistemology

  12. Milan Kundera _ The Curtain: An Essay in Seven

    What does it mean to demonstrate in the streets, what is the significance of that collective activity so symptomatic of the twentieth century? In stupefaction Ulrich watches the demonstrators from the window; as they reach the foot of the palace, their faces turn up, turn furious, the men brandish their walking sticks, but "a few steps farther, at a bend where the demonstration seemed to scatter into the wings, most of them were already dropping their greasepaint: it would be absurd to keep up the menacing looks where there were no more spectators." In the light of that metaphor, the demonstrators are not men in a rage; they are actors performing rage! As soon as the performance is over they are quick to drop their greasepaint! Later, in the 1960s, philosophers would talk about the modern world in which everything had turned into spectacle: demonstrations, wars, and even love; through this "quick and sagacious penetration" {Fielding}, Musil had already long ago discerned the "society of spectacle.
    book-quotepoliticsrageprotest
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