Canon Literature Quotes

The whelp went home, and went to bed. If he had had any sense of what he had done that night, and had been less of a whelp and more of a brother, he might have turned short on the road, might have gone down to the ill-smelling river that was dyed black, might have gone to bed in it for good and all, and have curtained his head for ever with its filthy waters. ~ Charles Dickens

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties. ~ Harold Bloom

A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him. ~ Philip Zaleski

Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder. ~ Harold Bloom

Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The aim of literary ambition is to demonstrate one's greatness of soul. ~ Mason Cooley

The gleam in their eyes telegraphs only too clearly that they are hoping for a headline, which of course means something disparaging, because nothing makes such good copy as a feud. ~ Leslie Charteris

Lewis was a scholar and deeply spiritual man, so it is no surprise that all his characters have to face the complex nature of of the human condition. As a young boy, Lewis suffered from terrible nightmares...Reading fantasy helped Lewis deal with the fears that plagued him in real life. He believed that fantasy makes it easier for children to cope with their fears. In an essay in support of fantasy literature for children, he wrote, "Since it is so likely they will meet cruel enemies{in real life], let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker." By writing about serious themes like distrust, pride, temptation, and greed in a fantastical environment , Lewis helps readers recognize these emotions and forces in their own lives. ~ E.J. Kirk

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the PRIVACY of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

It was given to Abba Anthony to see a doctor in Alexandria who was simply and humbly doing what God had given him to do. His inner being stood in the presence of the Lord as he worked and prayed. According to the literature of the desert, this is the goal of our life in this world as it is set out for all Christians, a goal that the solitary monk tried to attain through his special vocation. ~ Elisabeth Behr-Sigel

Lady Kimbuck's eyes gleamed. She took the package eagerly. She never lost an opportunity of reading compromising letters. She enjoyed them as literature, and there was never any knowing when they might come in useful. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Any man's life can be seen as a series of engagements with his fathers, Including the surrogates provided by life and literature. ~ Richard Brookhiser

I liked the darkness, the dusty bay window, the view over the grey, muddy harbour and the towering cliffs beyond. How could I think of all that and dislike it, really, when in every nook and cranny I felt Peter's eyes peering out, watching me? ~ Ava Bloomfield

Make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

No, one of the great things about my three-year deal is that it's year-round. They've offered me an opportunity to cover a lot of things in the offseason, too. ~ Lisa Guerrero

I'm 82 years old, wherever I go everybody knows me, but here's why ... I'm a merchandiser, I'm not just a writer, I stay in every avenue you can think of. ~ Mickey Spillane

When you've got a thing to say,
Say it! Don't take half a day.
When your tale's got little in it
Crowd the whole thing in a minute!
Life is short
a fleeting vapor
Don't you fill the whole blamed paper
With a tale which, at a pinch,
Could be cornered in an inch!
Boil her down until she simmers,
Polish her until she glimmers. ~ Joel Chandler Harris

A person dishonored is worst than dead. ~ Miguel De Cervantes

Children's literature as a literary aberration or at best a minor amusement is a notion held most strongly by people who read the fewest children's books. I think it was Ruth Hill Viguers who compared this attitude with asking a pediatrician when he's going to stop fooling around and get down to the serious business of treating adults. ~ Lloyd Alexander

The natural sciences are sometimes said to have no concern with values, nor to seek morality and goodness, and therefore belong to an inferior order of things. Counter-claims are made that they are the only living and dynamic studies ... Both contentions are wrong. Language, Literature and Philosophy express, reflect and contemplate the world. But it is a world in which men will never be content to stay at rest, and so these disciplines cannot be cut off from the great searching into the nature of things without being deprived of life-blood. ~ Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

[ ... ] I'm about to get on a plane here, and I'm packing recovery literature. All I know is I'm going to be the guy reading the book on co-dependency. That's what I know about me. ~ Marc Maron

If we go on in this way, we shall have a new art of poetry, of which one of the first rules will be: To remember to forget that there are any such things as sunshine and music in the world. ~ Thomas Love Peacock

There is no book so bad it does not contain something good. ~ Pliny

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers. ~ Maureen Corrigan

It is not good to have a rule of many. ~ Homer

You should never read just for "enjoyment." Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick "hard books." Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, "I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth." Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of "literature"? That means fiction, too, stupid. ~ John Waters

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. ~ Marcel Proust

If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times, and their parents are going to have to read it with them. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed. ~ Mark Haddon

She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses…

Orlando then came to the conclusion (opening half-a-dozen books)…that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea…next (here were half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that literature since it all these dinners must be growing very corpulent; next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the Influence of this upon that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle's sound-proof room at Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very delicate… ~ Virginia Woolf

People are more concerned about the economy then these ridiculous concerns as to gender inequity in society, as manifested in marriages, in the mental health system, and then in literature. ~ Kate Zambreno

In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of words together, and we learn what language does and why it matters. this is excellent training for going out into the world and looking at all the unhallowed speech of political statements and news headlines and CDC instructions and seeing how it makes the word or in this case, makes a mess of it. It is the truest, highest purpose of language to make things clear and help us see; when words are used to do the opposite you know you're in trouble and maybe that there's a cover-up. ~ Rebecca Solnit

There is always a unique atmosphere in the car when you drive through the City with a dead body in the back. ~ Steen Langstrup

And even these ((the common hill fairy, the standard elf of folk-lore) are in danger of being banished into the limbo of forgetfulness by the quite artificial fairy of juvenile literary commerce, with gauzy wing and skirts reminiscent of the ballet. It has always seemed to me extraordinary that literature has been able to create wings where none were before, for our native fairies are as wingless as ourselves. But for such an innovation the Elizabethan poets and playwrights were probably responsible - a topic which we must consider in another chapter. ~ Lewis Spence

Love hurts.

Think back over romance novels you've loved or the genre-defining books that drive our industry. The most unforgettable stories and characters spring from crushing opposition. What we remember about romance novels is the darkness that drives them. Three hundred pages of folks being happy together makes for a hefty sleeping pill, but three hundred pages of a couple finding a way to be happy in the face of impossible odds makes our hearts soar. In darkness, we are all alone.

So don't just make love, make anguish for your characters. As you structure a story, don't satisfy your hero's desires, thwart them. Make sure your solutions create new problems. Nurture your characters doubts and despair. Make them earn the happy ending they want, even better…make them deserve it. Delay and disappointment charge situations and validate character growth. Misery accompanies love. It's no accident that many of the stories we think of as timeless romances in Western Literature are fiercely tragic: Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Cupid and Psyche… the pain in them drags us back again and again, hoping that this time we'll find a way out of the dark.

Only if you let your characters get lost will we get lost in them. And that, more than anything else, is what romance can and should do for its protagonists and its readers: lead us through the labyrinth, skirt the monstrous despair roaming its halls, and find our way into daylight. ~ Damon Suede

The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie. ~ James Dickey

And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s. ~ Thomas Keneally

I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this
which is wha makes it essential. ~ David Shields

I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don't. ~ D.H. Lawrence

So
I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me
if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any body of great literature. I can only protest, like all rakes in their shameful senescence, that I have had a good time. ~ Robertson Davies

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea. ~ David Brin

It is not possible to express the most precious insights,
To see all that craves to be seen,
To visit even the closest neighbors in the universe,
To learn all that needs to be learned,
To live without dying,
And I am sad about it.
But I lived
And I am happy about that. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Be able to back up a car for a considerable distance in a straight line and back out of a driveway. ~ Marilyn Vos Savant

I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart. ~ Salman Rushdie

This poem declares the absence of a Hindu canon.
This poem declares itself the Hindu canon.
This poem follows the monkey.
This poem worships the horse.
This poem supersedes the Vedas and the supreme scriptures.
This poem does not culture the jungle.
This poem jungles the culture.
This poem storms into temples with tanks.
This poem stands corrected: the RSS is BJP's mother.
This poem is not vulnerable.
This poem is Section 153-A proof.
This poem is also idiot-proof.
This poem quotes Dr.Ambedkar.
This poem considers Ramayana a hetero-normative novel.
This poem breaches Section 295A of the Indian Penile Code.
This poem is pure and total blasphemy. ~ Meena Kandasamy

Invisible magpies warbled in the plane trees. Softly, gently, never running out of melodic ideas, they perched among the leaves and spun out their endless tales. ~ Helen Garner

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately. ~ Virginia Woolf

Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day. ~ James L. Brooks

A travesty that for coarseness, vulgarity, and buffoonery is almost unexampled even in the literature of that day. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world. ~ Claire Colebrook

I would not attack the faith of a heathen without being sure I had a better one to put in its place. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe