April 27, 2017

ANITA DESAI (B. 1937), AN INDIAN NOVELIST AND SHORT STORY WRITER, ESPECIALLY NOTED FOR HER SENSITIVE PORTRAYAL OF THE INNER LIFE OF HER FEMALE CHARACTERS.

“Isn't it strange how life won't flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood?” ~ Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day

“Isn't it strange how life won't flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood?”
~ Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day

“Do you know anyone who would — secretly, sincerely, in his innermost self — really prefer to return to childhood? “
~ Anita Desai, The Clear Light of Day

“They never looked at anyone else, only at each other, with an expression that halted me. It was tender, loving, yes, but in an inhuman way, so intense. Divine, I felt. Or insane.”
~ Anita Desai, Studies in the Park

“Even though his cigarette stank — it was a local one, wrapped in a tendu leaf, fierce enough to make his head swim — he could smell the distinctive Indian odour — of dung, both of cattle and men, of smoke from the village hearts, of cattle food and cattle urine, of dust, of pungent food cooking, of old ragged clothes washed without soap and put out to dry, the aroma of poverty.”
~ Anita Desai, Baumgartner's Bombay

“It seemed to her that the dullness and the boredom of her childhood, her youth, were stored here in the room under the worn dusty red rugs, in the bloated brassware, amongst the dried grasses in the swollen vases, behind the yellowed photographs in the oval frames-everything, everything that she had so hated as a child and that was still preserved here as if this were the storeroom of some dull, uninviting provincial museum.”
~ Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day

 “At first she mistook them for sheets of pink crepe paper that someone had crumpled and carelessly flung down the hillside, perhaps after another astonishing party at the club. A moment later she remembered her great-grandmother's words and saw that they were hosts of wild pink zephyranthes that had come up in the night after the first fall of rain.”
~ Anita Desai, Fire on the Mountain

“Although it was shadowy and dark, Bim could see as well as by the clear light of day that she felt only love and yearning for them all, and if there were hurts, these gashes in her side that bled, then it was only because her love was imperfect and did not encompass them thoroughly enough, and because it had flaws and inadequacies and did not extend to all equally.”
~ Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day

“They should be sitting together in the moonlight, looking together at  the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being.”
~ Anita Desai, Clear light of Day

“Greenness hangs, drips and sways from every branch and twig and frond in the surging luxuriance of July.”
~ Anita Desai, Fasting, Feasting

“Only their efforts to make him talk failed. he would say one word at a time, if pressed, but seemed happier not to and could not be made to repeat a whole line. Gradually, as his family learnt how to anticipate his few needs and how to respond, they ceased to notice his silence -his manner of communication seemed full and rich enough to them: he no more needed to converse than Aunt Mira's cat did.”
~ Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day

“The room rang with her voice, then with silence. In the shaded darkness, silence had the quality of a looming dragon. It seemed to roar and the roar to reverberate, to dominate. To escape from it would require a burst of recklessness, even cruelty.”
~ Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day

“Quick, nervy and jumpy -yet to the children she was as constant as a staff, a tree that can be counted on not to pull up its root and shift in the night. She was the tree that grew in the centre of their lives and in whose shade they lived.”
~ Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day

“The wheel turns and turns and turns: it never stops and stands still.”
~ Anita Desai, The Village by the Sea

“The scent of earth receiving water, slaking its thirst in great gulps and releasing that green scent of freshness, coolness.”
~ Anita Desai, Games at Twilight

“It took them a minute to grasp what he was saying, even who he was. They had quite forgotten him.”
~ Anita Desai, Games at Twilight

JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE (1871-1909), IRISH PLAYWRIGHT, POET, PROSE WRITER, TRAVEL WRITER AND COLLECTOR OF FOLKLORE.

 “The absence of the heavy boot of Europe has preserved to these people the agile walk of the wild animal, while the general simplicity of their lives has given them many other points of physical perfection.” ~ John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands

 “The absence of the heavy boot of Europe has preserved to these people the agile walk of the wild animal, while the general simplicity of their lives has given them many other points of physical perfection.”
~ John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands

“At first I threw my weight upon my heels, as one does naturally in a boot, and was a good deal bruised, but after a few hours I learned the natural walk of man, and could follow my guide in any portion of the island.”
~ John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands

“What is the price of a thousand horses against a son where there is one son only?”
~ John Millington Synge, Riders to the Sea

“A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, he said, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.”
~ John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands

“A low line of shore was visible at first on the right between the movement of the waves and fog, but when we came further it was lost sight of, and nothing could be seen but the mist curling in the rigging, and a small circle of foam.”
~ John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands

“A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.”
~ John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands

“A week of sweeping fogs has passed over and given me a strange sense of exile and desolation. I walk round the island nearly every day, yet I can see nothing anywhere but a mass of wet rock, a strip of surf, and then a tumult of waves.”
~ John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands

“In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple.”
~ John Millington Synge, The Playboy of the Western World

“In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest — usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation — and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.”
~ John Millington Synge, The Vagrants of Wicklow

“In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.”
~ John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands

“It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction to find myself moving away from civilisation in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went to sea.”
~ John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands

“I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds,
The gray and wintry sides of many glens,
And did but half remember human words,
In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens.”
~ John Millington Synge, Prelude

“In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest—usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation—and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.”
~ John Millington Synge, The Vagrants of Wicklow

“The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.”
~ John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands

April 25, 2017

JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924), POLISH-BORN ENGLISH AUTHOR AND MASTER MARINER WHO IS BEST NOTED FOR HEART OF DARKNESS (1902)

18 best quotations by Joseph Conrad on dream, life, women, evil, civilization, human nature, and savagery. “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” ~ Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

“All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced”
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“He struggled with himself, too. I saw it — I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Chance

“But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness


“Your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“A woman's true tenderness, like the true virility of man, is expressed in action of a conquering kind.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

“They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

“A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!”
~ Joseph Conrad, The Lagoon

“I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life...”
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.”
~ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

April 5, 2017

KATHERINE MANSFIELD (1888 –1923), THE PSEUDONYM OF KATHLEEN MANSFIELD MURRY, WHO WAS A MAJOR NEW ZEALAND MODERNIST WRITER OF SHORT STORY.

“Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.” ~ Katherine Mansfield, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927)

“Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.”
~ Katherine Mansfield, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927), Journal entry: 14 October 1922

“Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. This is the mystery. This is what I must do.”
~ Katherine Mansfield, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927), Journal entry: 19 December 1920

“It's an infernal nuisance to love Life as I do. I seem to love it more as time goes on rather than less. It never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel. I do hope I'll be able to keep in it long enough to do some really good work. I'm sick of people dying who promise well.”
~ Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, vol. IV, Letter to Anne Estelle Rice: 21 May 1921

“Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order. This is what life has taught me.”
~ Katherine Mansfield, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927), Journal entry: 10 October 1922

“Warm, eager, living life — to be rooted in life — to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for. … This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it’s no longer so. I feel happy — deep down. All is well.”
~ Katherine Mansfield, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927), Journal entry: 29 January 1922

“When we can begin to take our failures nonseriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them. It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.”
~ Katherine Mansfield, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927), Journal entry: October 1922

“I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing (Though I may write about cabmen. That's no matter.) But warm, eager, living life — to be rooted in life — to learn, to desire, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.”
~ Katherine Mansfield, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927), Journal entry: 14 October 1922

“When I say "I fear" — don't let it disturb you, dearest heart. We all fear when we are in waiting-rooms. Yet we must pass beyond them, and if the other can keep calm, it is all the help we can give each other.”
~ Katherine Mansfield, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927), Journal entry: 14 October 1922

“The ostrich burying its head in the sand does at any rate wish to convey the impression that its head is the most important part of it.”
~ Katherine Mansfield, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield

“Sleeping was her latest discovery. It’s so wonderful. One simply shuts one’s eyes, that’s all. It’s so delicious.”
~ Katherine Mansfield, Marriage A La Mode

“It is the only life I care about—to write, to go out occasionally and ‘lose myself’ looking and hearing and then to come back and write again. At any rate that’s the life I’ve chosen.”
~ Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume 1: 1903-1917

“Oh, with you, I could conquer the world - oh, with you I could catch hold of the moon like a little silver sixpence.”
~ Katherine Mansfield, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield

“And it seemed to her that kisses, voices, tinkling spoons, laughter, the smell of crushed grass were somehow inside her.
~ Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party

“What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful.”
~ Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party

April 3, 2017

ADRIENNE RICH (1929 –2012), AN AMERICAN POET AND ESSAYIST, BEST KNOWN FOR HER EXAMINATION OF THE EXPERIENCES OF WOMEN IN SOCIETY.

“I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well.” ~ Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985

 “Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.”
~ Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying

“No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems

“I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Twenty One Love Poems

“If you think you can grasp me, think again:
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the riverbed
with its five fingers spread”
~ Adrienne Rich, Time's Power

“If I cling to circumstances I could feel
not responsible. Only she who says
she did not choose, is the loser in the end.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems

“Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

 “No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Sources

“Sleeping, turning in turn like planets
rotating in their midnight meadow:
a touch is enough to let us know
we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep:
the dream-ghosts of two worlds
walking their ghost-towns, almost address each other.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems

“The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.”
~ Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

“Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations

“Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”
~ Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

“In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.”
~ Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

“I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images    for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Planetarium

 “These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck

“Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.”
~ Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

“There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.”
~ Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

“Feminism means finally that we renounce our obedience to the fathers and recognise that the world they have described is not the whole world. Masculine ideologies are the creation of masculine subjectivity; they are neither objective, nor value-free, nor inclusively "human." Feminism implies that we recognise for us, the distortion, of male-created ideologies, and that we proceed to think, and act, out of that recognition.”
~ Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

“I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child”
~ Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck

“Nothing can be done but by inches. I write out my life hour by hour, word by word . . . imagining the existence of something uncreated this poem our lives.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck

“The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities”
~ Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

 “The failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

“if you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces.”
~ Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

“Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because coming out of "abnormal" childhoods they wanted to feel "normal," and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment. We may faithfully or ambivalently have obeyed the institution, but our feelings - and our sensuality - have not been tamed or contained within it.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

“I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985

“I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male "fear of women" and of women's sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men really fear, not that they will have women's sexual appetites forced on them, or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotional-therefore economic-access to women only on women's terms, otherwise being left on the periphery of the matrix.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

“I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.”
~ Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck

April 1, 2017

What is Research Paper?

Research is the methodical investigation into a subject in order to discover facts, to establish or revise a theory, or to develop a plan of action based on the facts discovered. The findings and conclusions of such an investigation appear in the research paper. The term ‘research paper’ refers to a particular genre of academic writing, in which the writer’s own interpretation, evaluation, or argument on a specific issue is given prominence.

A research paper involves surveying a field of knowledge in order to find the best possible information in that field. Such information is then utilised to present a competent argument on a topic. Hence a research paper requires a presentation of one’s own thinking backed up by others’ ideas and information. In short, a research paper is:
  • focused on a specific issue or problem,
  • a presentation of facts that are based upon extensive reading and extraction of information from several sources, and
  • original in selection of literature, evaluation, expression and conclusion.

Waht are the Qualities of a Good Research Paper?

Whatever may be the types of research works and studies, one thing that is important is that they all meet on the common ground of systematic method employed by them. One expects systematic research to satisfy certain criteria. Usually a research is considered good when it is:
  1. Systematic: It means that research is structured with specified steps to be taken in a specified sequence in accordance with the well defined set of rules. Systematic characteristic of the research does not rule out (discard, prevent) creative thinking but it certainly does reject the use of guessing and intuition arriving at conclusions.
  2. Logical: This implies that research is guided by the rules of logical reasoning and the logical process of induction and deduction are of great value in carrying out research. Induction is the process of reasoning from a part to the whole whereas deduction is the process of reasoning from the premise. In fact, logical reasoning makes research more meaningful in the context of decision making.
  3. Empirical/Tangible: It implies that research is related basically to one or more aspects of a real situation and deals with concrete data that provides a basis for external validity to research results.
  4. Replicable: Replicability is one of the most important yardsticks for judging the quality of a research. The researcher’s presentation and explanation of the system, logic, and data collection should be designed in such a way that the reader is able to replicate the study.
  5. Reductive: A good research can reduce the confusion of facts that language and language teaching frequently present.
  6. Comprehensive: A research can be considered good if it has the ability encompass all important parts of the topic into a complete picture. But it should not present excessive detail which may hamper the development of the thought.
  7. Prolific: It suggests that a good research builds on, but also offers something new to, previous research.  It should have the potential to suggest directions for future research.
  8. Relevant: A good researcher will be able to extract relevant information from large amounts of info. Complete research will have the core information, or sets of core information, which together answers the question directly, and the contextual information, which determines whether or not the core research is applicable to given circumstances. That is, the research must be relevant.
  9. Well-executed: The researcher should also be able to convey the research in an accessible format that is, the research must be easy to make use of.

 
Research Paper

 

References

Brown, James Dean. Understanding Research in Second Language Learning. Cambridge: CUP, 1988


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