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Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Society Is The Stage On Which Manners

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.
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Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptable for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. in the journal i do not just express myself more openly than i could to any person; i create myself. ... the journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. it represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.
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Knowing means to penetrate through the surface, in order to arrive at the roots, and hence the causes; knowing means to "see" reality in its nakedness. knowing does not mean to be in the possession of the truth; it means to penetrate the surface and to strive critically and actively in order to approach truth ever more closely.
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My only passions were books and music. as you might guess, i led a lonely life… not that i knew what i wanted in life - i didn’t. i loved reading novels to distraction, but didn’t write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, i decided, not part of your work or study. that’s why i didn’t study literature
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I am a product of endless books. my father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. there were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic...in the seemingly endless rainy afternoons i took volume after volume from the shelves. i had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
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Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. manners are the archetypes of laws. manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.
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Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read. -letter to the fourth national congress of soviet writers
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