Wilderness Areas

Famous quotes containing the words wilderness and/or areas:

    There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
    As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
    They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.
    There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
    Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
    They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality....
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy.
    Doris Lessing (b. 1919)