A Quote by Parker J. Palmer

Why does a literary scholar study the world of "fiction"? To show us that the facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination.

Parker J. Palmer

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Communion Does Except Facts Fiction Imagination Literary Never Scholar Show Study Understood Us Why World

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Parker J. Palmer
American - Author
Born: 1939

It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.

Michael Moorcock

Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we [Europeans] shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.

Jean Baudrillard

I have never quite understood - and this is no doubt my failing - I never quite understood why you would read fiction to understand the human condition.

Richard Dawkins

The truth of the scholar, alone in his study, does not always accord with what the world at large considers to be true.

Eiji Yoshikawa

I certainly incorporate facts into my fiction. I take the basic facts from the life of my subject and I pick and choose what to use to construct a really interesting novel. I don't let facts get in the way of my imagination and my exploration of the subject's emotions and relationships.

Melanie Benjamin

Why couldn't the world that concerns us- be a fiction? And if somebody asked, 'but to be a fiction there surely belongs an author?'- couldn't one answer simply: 'Why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the fiction, too?'

Friedrich Nietzsche

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

Mohsin Hamid

Oh, don't tell me of facts, I never believe facts; you know, [George] Canning said nothing was so fallacious as facts, except figures.

Sydney Smith

... up to this date, I have never been shut up in a separate room, or hedged off with any observances. My study, all the study I have attained to, is the little 2nd drawing room where all the (feminine) life of the house goes on; and I don't think I have ever had two hours undisturbed (except at night, when everybody is in bed) during my whole literary life.

Margaret Oliphant

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

George R. R. Martin

We all have a lot of people inside us, yet we get to live only one life. Fiction lets us slip into someone else’s skin, so to speak. That’s why we read novels, and also why we write them - to experience more life, through imagination.

Steven Saylor

Facts are certainly the solid and true foundation of all sectors of nature study ... Reasoning must never find itself contradicting definite facts; but reasoning must allow us to distinguish, among facts that have been reported, those that we can fully believe, those that are questionable, and those that are false. It will not allow us to lend faith to those that are directly contrary to others whose certainty is known to us; it will not allow us to accept as true those that fly in the face of unquestionable principles.

Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

Dennis Lehane

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

Oscar Wilde

The literary artist will ... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

I get the facts, I study them patiently, I apply imagination.

Bernard Baruch

A Quote by Parker J. Palmer

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