A Quote by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.
Related Quotes
Knowledge is more important than life. We've only one excuse for existing, to think, to find out, to learn.
Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.
Culture is fundamental. Literature saves you. Cinema saves you.
To Him I owe my life and breath, And all the joys I have; He makes me triumph over death, And saves me from the grave.
I've still got to do something to help, however tiny it is. I always think of the old Hebrew saying, which is translated roughly into, 'He who saves one life saves the world,' because it's pretty ghastly to think of all the people we're not saving.
I believe in a kind of literature which makes clear that, at a deeper level, below the surface, we are tied together through invisible but existing threads. A kind of literature which talks about a lively, ever-changing world of unity, of which we are a small, but not insignificant part.
Tidiness ... makes life easier and more agreeable, does harm to no one and actually saves time and trouble to the person who practices it: there must be an ominous flaw to explain why millions of generations continue to reject it.
Everybody hates dependence, and that's why couples are continuously fighting, not knowing why they are fighting. They have to meditate over it, they have to contemplate over it, why they are fighting. Everything is just an excuse to fight. If you change one excuse, another excuse will be found; if no excuse is left then excuses will be invented, but somehow the fight has to be there.
If you want to draw people into the story, you really have to write as if you're writing a novel and make these actually-existing people, including the actually-existing person with my name, into a believable person on the page. And that requires distance. That requires not being right up against the events you're talking about.
I think we love the fantasy of being the one person who can really touch the person who has been untouchable for everybody else. There's something that makes us feel very special about that; that we could be the one out of everyone who's tried and everybody who's wanted to reach that person - you're the only one who could do it.
In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them.
If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.
That bumper sticker everyone has down in Philadelphia, the one that says, 'Only the Lord saves more than Bernie Parent,' really isn't true. God couldn't have made all the saves that Parent made against us.
There are regulations all over the spectrum that have to be done to the existing situation right now. But the only policy that makes sense is a nationwide moratorium: no new fracking, no new fracked wells.
Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.
When we write about Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can only write a black novel about Auschwitz or - you should excuse the expression - a cheap serial, which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over.
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