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Quote by Patrick White

“They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn't notice he was touched, because he wouldn't have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.”

Book:The Vivisector

Work

The Vivisector

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Author

Patrick White

Patrick White was an Australian writer renowned for his unique literary style and profound social insight. His works often explore the relationship between individuals and society, as well as the respect for Indigenous Australian culture. White's writing has received international recognition, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. more

“As an anarch, who acknowledges neither law nor custom, I owe it to myself to get at the very heart of things. I then probe them in terms of their contradictions, like image and mirror image. Either is imperfect – by seeking to unite them, which I practice every morning, I manage to catch a corner of reality.”

Reality Law Custom Anarch

Book:Eumeswil

Source: Eumeswil

“Its like reproaching someone who has no ear for music because he's bored at a symphony concert. Is it fair to blame me because you ascribed to me qualities that I hadn't got? I never tried to deceive you by pretending I was anything I wasn't. I was just pretty and gay. You don't ask for a pearl necklace or a sable coat at a booth in a fair; you ask for a tin trumpet and a toy balloon.”

Reality Expectation

Author:W. Somerset Maugham

“According to this model, human beings are, at least in one aspect, sensation-receiving machines; and although our receptory apparatus is competent to select and organize outward stimuli within the narrow range necessary for physical survival within our environment, it does not necessarily tell us very much about the nature of that environment. People, in other words, have little access to the possible world existing beyond their sensations.”

Reality Perception Senses Sensation

Book:The Haunted dusk: American supernatural fiction, 1820-1920

Source: The Haunted dusk: American supernatural fiction, 1820-1920

“This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity, and if he writes what occurs to him he succeeds better than if he copies, with the help of a magnifying glass, objects placed outside of him.”