Ann Morgan > Quotes

“Tất cả những ai yêu đọc sách đều hiểu rằng sách có quyền năng siêu việt đưa bạn thoát khỏi bản thể và thâm nhập vào tâm trí của người khác, để ít nhất trong một khoảnh khắc, bạn ngắm nhìn thế giới qua đôi mắt khác. Đó có thể là một trải nghiệm không dễ chịu, nhất là khi bạn đọc cuốn sách của một nền văn hóa có thể có những giá trị hoàn toàn khác với bạn.”
― Ann Morgan

“Beyond the offer tables and online bestseller charts are many other narratives: books that take readers away from what they know, challenge the assumptions that underpin life elsewhere and present a strikingly different world [“How Books Get Lost In translation,” Financial Times, January 15, 2015].”
― Ann Morgan

“Oh yes, you’ve got questions. You want to know how it is that they’re sitting on that side of the desk and you’re sitting here. You want them to let you in on the secret of ‘normal’ and what it really means. You wonder how it’s possible in a world of Friends and novelty ringbinders for people to be shackled to a radiator so tightly they bleed, like the girl up the corridor was by her stepfather, or punched in the face until their bones go like jelly and the doctors have to rebuild them piece by piece.
But you have learnt these are not the questions people like this answer. They want easy questions. Questions they can see round the edges of. Questions you could probably answer by yourself if you gave it any thought.
So you don’t say anything. You shrug and shake your head, and let them dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s of your future as they see fit. Let them bring it, all of it, as much as they can manage: whatever it is, it can’t be worse than what you’ve already been through.”
― Ann Morgan, Beside Myself

“Freeing us from the obligation to get involved, fiction (and I would argue, memoirs...) allow us to enter wholeheartedly into the events described. We are as Keen puts it, in a 'safe zone'. These are not charity adverts crafted to manipulate our emotions with a view to making us take specific action. We do not have to watch our back or prepare out excuses in the thick of a story...And no one will judge us for failing to do any of these things, because the people and situations we have been reading about do not (or no longer exist). With the best will in the world, there is nothing we can do to change them- however much we might like to ...chuck Fantine a bob or two. We cannot even begin to try.”
― Ann Morgan

“Love. I should write a poem about it I could write a poem about it if the words didn't come so fast I would write a poem about it.”
― Ann Morgan, Beside Myself

“What a mean existence it must be to stay always in the shallows, bobbing on little eddies of feeling, and never weather the pitching and plunging of the open ocean and face the knowledge that events might overwhelm and wreck you.”
― Ann Morgan, Beside Myself

“As the German literary scholar Wolfgang Iser wrote, 'with reading there is no face-to face situation'; we have the luxury of getting rid of our faces too. Wed don't have to be ourselves, with all the logistical, financial and emotional complications that our lives entail. We don't really have to be anyone at all. And while we might never lose ourselves completely because we are, after all, the organism that brings the story to life at the moment, we can unclasp quite a lot of the inhibitions and worries that buckle us into who we are. Paradoxically, at the same time as being able to be more self indulgent by escaping into a world where no one can reasonably expect us to do anything, we have the luxury of putting ourselves and our needs, wants, and fears aside for a while; by being more selfish in a book we become less self-ish.”
― Ann Morgan

“I glanced up at my bookshelves, the proud record of more than twenty years of reading, and found a host of English and North American greats starting down at me…I had barely touched a work by a foreign language author in years…The awful truth dawned. I was a literary xenophobe”
― Ann Morgan

“In addition, things that I had lived with unthinkingly because they were widespread took on a new strangeness, and terms that made up part of the basic trappings of conversation started to chafe. I began to feel as never before how limiting catch-all labels for different groups in society are... Words such as 'black' or 'white' felt cramped and inadequate as a means of talking about ethnicity, suggesting, as they did , that I must have more in common with an Albanian donkey farmer than with the Zimbabwean-British family living down the hallway from me...

The same things held true for some of the terms I had been used to framing the world with. Words like 'developed' and 'developing' ... suddenly revealed themselves as Trojan horses packed with assumptions.”
― Ann Morgan

“The danger with demanding authenticity, or 'spirit' of a place, in a book is that we look for what we expect to see and miss what is there. Instead of allowing the stories of a region to open our minds and lead us in new directions, we can become narrow and petty, demanding that regional literature conform to our expectations. Far from broadening our horizons, we risk shutting ourselves in a hall of mirrors where we see our version of the world reflect back at us ad infinitum.”
― Ann Morgan