Asian Literature Quotes

Gossip is not adopted by the bored. It is an art of discourse adopted by those who have experienced absolutely nothing thrilling in their lives; they have never really fallen in love or casually spoken to a complete stranger, and they never dreamt of doing anything extraordinary. They are a group of people with dull lives and souls. ~ Kanza Javed

Capital dictates the fate of humanity. ~ Pramoedya Ananta Toer

I do not need to understand words to know he is disappointed I am not a boy. Some things need no translation. And I know, because my body remembers without benefit of words, that men who do not welcome girl-babies will not treasure me as I grow to woman - though he call me princess just because the Guru told him to.

I have come so far, I have borne so much pain and emptiness!

But men have not yet changed. ~ Shauna Singh Baldwin

We do not know if she collapsed because of overwhelming joy, extreme surprise, grave disappointment, or heavy anxiety that for the next months and years she would live with a human male, because in fact she had been honest when she told her girlfriends that she had given up on men, OR NONE OF THE ABOVE. ~ Kyoko Yoshida

Feng thought that her mother's education would give her confidence to speak up for what is right, but no amount of learning could unshackle her from society's attitude towards women, and she chose to remain an apathetic bystander. ~ Shirley Fung

One realizes the immortality of true love only after the lover dies ~ Kanza Javed

The divorced Indian lady combines every fantasy about the liberated, wicked Western woman with the safety net of basic submissive familiarity. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

How could we have allowed the instinct bred within us over the centuries to draw lines and never cross them, an infinity of lines, ever-smaller lines, ever-sharper distinctions? I grieved for Didi's generation of "girls of good family," who put caste, duty and family reputation before self-indulgence. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

Where, in Heaven's name, could anyone even be alone in Calcutta? What hanky-panky business, in my mother's words, could go on? Everyone knew the rules and the rules stated caste and community narrowed the range of intimate contact. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto - God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger ... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined. ~ Dorothy Allison

Basically, being alive means keeping yourself ready for the sky to fall in on you at any time. If you start from the assumption that existence is only an ordeal, a test we have to pass, then you're equipped to deal with its sorrows and its surprises. If you persist in expecting it to give you something it can't give, that just proves that you haven't understood anything. Take things as they come; don't turn them into a drama. You're not piloting the ship, you're following the course of your destiny. ~ Yasmina Khadra

That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making. ~ Walter De La Mare

This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature-that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null. ~ F.L. Lucas

There can be no question that the loss of TV manufacture in the United States was a disruption, but the loss had not been brought about by a disruptive technology or disruptive innovation. The key factor in disruption was the Asian approach to innovation, based primarily on process improvement and optimal design. ~ Haydn Shaughnessy

The mass of the people regard as profound only him who suggests pungent contradictions of the general idea. In ratiocination, not less than in literature, it is the epigram which is the most immediately and the most universally appreciated. In both, it is of the lowest order of merit. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Being 'contented' ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Literature can be divided into two large families: the religious and the secular one. The first reveals the origin of stupidity, the second follows its evolution. ~ William C. Brown

There's a different flavor to children's literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up. ~ Mizuki Nomura

The small courtesies sweeten life; the greater ennoble it. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee

But the fact is, again and again in my lifetime, the vicious vituperations, the polemics, the dialectics, the sophistries of politics have become vapour and mist, while what remains is the literature and the art, which at the time might have been merely tolerated by the politicos. ~ Doris Lessing

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world. ~ Don DeLillo

There's a history of English literature where the best boils to the top, and Jane Austen stands right at the top of that. ~ JJ Feild

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention. ~ Flannery O'Connor

I never thought I'd fall madly in love with literature. ~ Wency June Libot

Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. ~ Donna Tartt

All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool. ~ Steven Brust

Without space, there is no time. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Books are carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows of the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

There are two methods for the literary study of any book - the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps. ~ Elizabeth George

ABOUT SENTIMENTALITY IN LITERATURE:
"Sentimental fiction is a kind of pablum: Excessive amounts can spoil the appetite for reality, or at least for more fibrous forms of art. One reason, surely, why readers throw down books when they don't contain sufficiently "likable" characters is that their tolerance for any sort of moral challenge - for being asked, say, to sympathize with homeless little boys who are godless and truculent and a bit smelling - has been eroded by too many fairy tales masquerading as adult literature."~ wrote Zoe Heller for Bookends in the Sunday's NY Times Book Review interview ~ Alice Simpson

If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends. ~ Tom Hodgkinson

There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions. ~ Jane Austen

The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're decoding ~ Maureen Corrigan

O, great wise man,' she said, 'I have been wondering so many things. Is life more than sitting at home doing the same thing over and over? Wise man, is life more than watching one's relatives do unpleasant things, or more than grim tasks one must perform at school and at work? Is life more than being entertained by literature, wise man, or more than traveling from one place to another, suffering from poor emotional health and pondering the people one loves? And what about those who lead a life of mystery? And the mysteries of life? And, wise man, what about the overall feeling of doom that one cannot ever escape no matter what one does, and miscellaneous things that I have neglected to mention in specific? ~ Lemony Snicket

One reason why fiction is a human necessity is that it satisfies many unconscious as well as conscious needs. It would be important if it only touched the conscious mind, as expository writing does. But fiction is important, too, because it teaches the unconscious. ~ Mortimer J. Adler And Charles Van Doren

The rebellion against fascism is immensely important to society when its grip on our dreamers strangles the creativity out of our ambition, finally snuffing out all progress as we know it, and as if implanting a tombstone, parks institutions in its place. ~ Oliver Oyanadel

Where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is? ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people. ~ Christopher Morley

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man. ~ Gustave Flaubert

After a fellow gets famous it doesn't take long for someone to bob up that used to sit by him in school. ~ Kin Hubbard

Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature, said Balph Eubank contemptuously. ~ Ayn Rand

I must be doing something right. I've been around for a long time. ~ Geraldo Rivera

Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time. ~ Donna Tartt

people can die of mere imagination ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

In greatness, life and death merge. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books--I'm talking about my friends and myself--went beyond love. It was as if we didn't know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn't simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.

They showed us what was possible. We had been living with whatever was close at hand, whatever was given, and books took us great distances. We had known only domestic emotions and they showed us what happens to emotions when they are homeless. Books gave us balance--the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity. ~ Anatole Broyard