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Quote by Steven Magee

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Steven Magee

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“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”

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Author:Brent Weeks
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“…my whole life I had been engaging in the hard work of learning to run for myself, not for others. I had been learning how to return to myself, again and again, in a world full of forces that consistently pull us away. I wanted to hold tight to that knowledge; even more strongly, I wanted to pass it on. I stood up from the track and began to run home.”

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Book:Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man's World
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“The rest of life was just waiting, waiting to go back to the Pudding. It was as if the lights were always on at the Pudding and off everywhere else. But those lights were soft, and the gentle, impressionistic shadows they shed on the dining room were always in the most delicate palette of peach, rose, and pinkish cream.”

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Book:Charlotte Au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood
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“The two-story dwellings of this city are, beyond all question, the best, as a system, not only owing to the single family ideas they represent, but because their cost is within the reach of all who desire to own their own homes. They have done more to elevate and to make a better home life than any other known influence. They typify a higher civilization, as well as a truer idea of American home life, and are better, purer, sweeter than any tenement house systems that ever existed. They are what make Philadelphia a city of homes, and command the attention of visitors from every quarter of the globe”

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Author:Frank H. Taylor
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“To love a country as if you’ve lost one: as if it were you on a plane departing from America forever, clouds closing like curtains on your country, the last scene in which you’re a madman scribbling the names of your favorite flowers, trees, and birds you’d never see again, your address and phone number you’d never use again, the color of your father’s eyes, your mother’s hair, terrified you could forget these. To love a country as if I was my mother last spring hobbling, insisting I help her climb all the way up to the U.S. Capitol, as if she were here before you today instead of me, explaining her tears, cheeks pink as the cherry blossoms coloring the air that day when she stopped, turned to me, and said: You know, mijo, it isn’t where you’re born that matters, it’s where you choose to die—that’s your country.”

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Book:How to Love a Country
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