Connecting To Literature Quotes

I don't want to be a vampire' she told herself. But in her dreams, she kind of did. ~ Holly Black

Literature tries to express the intricate inner beauties of life. Philosophy tries to explain the intricate inner beauties and conflicts of thoughts. ~ Debasish Mridha

But I don't believe coincidences are chance events. I think they're the times we happen to see the mysterious pattern connecting everything. ~ Julie Gittus

I think people are smart enough to sort it out. They know when they're watching one of these food fight shows where journalists sit around and yell and scream at each other, versus serious issue reporting. ~ Bob Woodward

An obstacle which would frighten discreet men is nothing to determined women. They dare what men avoid, and sometimes they achieve an unusual success. ~ Ōgai Mori

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

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain. ~ Christopher Morley

It seems to me as I reviewed the literature that, with few exceptions, the more confident were the prescriptions about how to behave with ethics and integrity, the further removed was the author from the life and work of the everyday manager. ~ Steve Kerr

The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end. ~ Clement Greenberg

The lesson I have learned is that a failure to cultivate the imagination leads to an unintended neglect of the imaginative literature of Scripture, and this in turn leads to some degree of spiritual atrophy. For Christians, the stories of Revelation are not optional reading. Nor are they child's play. Imaginative literature
the kind of literature that invites us to see in our imaginations what we cannot see with our eyes
is an important part of the Christian's literary diet. It challenges our idols. It challenges what is false and trivial in our lives. ~ Tony Reinke

The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. ~ T. S. Eliot

Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it with (Jonathan) Swift's anger. Instead, he hoped the example of his dictionary would temper that change by providing a distinguished literary example ~ Robert Lane Greene

Even when you're talking to them face to face you have this feeling of not connecting, as if the words just pass through them. Sometimes they remind me of the Invisible Man, but I've never quite understood why they end up that way. ~ Ryu Murakami

Around me the beautiful windows, connecting me to other lives and other times, to things done and also deliberately left undone, stood dark. Rose, I was sure, had acted out of love, yet for Iris her mother's absence had remained an unresolved sadness at the center of her life. I thought of what Rose had written about anger, about its power to corrupt, to make a space for evil. Maybe she was right. Maybe evil, that old-fashioned word, could be called other things, disharmony or dysfunction. Maybe Rose was right and evil wasn't attached top an individual as much as if was a force in the world, a seeing force, one that worked like a self-replicating virus, seeking to entangle, to ensnare, to undo beauty. [p.353] ~ Kim Edwards

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Buckley followed the three of them into the kitchen and asked, as he had at least once a day, "Where's Susie?"

They were silent. Samuel looked at Lindsey.

"Buckley," my father called from the adjoining room, "come play Monopoly with me."

My brother had never been invited to play Monopoly. Everyone said he was too young, but this was the magic of Christmas. He rushed into the family room, and my father picked him up and sat him on his lap.

"See this shoe?" my father said.

Buckley nodded his head.

"I want you to listen to everything I say about it, okay?"

"Susie?" my brother asked, somehow connecting the two.

"Yes, I'm going to tell you where Susie is."

I began to cry up in heaven. What else was there for me to do?

"This shoe was the piece Susie played Monopoly with," he said. "I play with the car or sometimes the wheelbarrow. Lindsey plays with the iron, and when you mother plays, she likes the cannon."

"Is that a dog?"

"Yes, that's a Scottie."

"Mine!"

"Okay," my father said. He was patient. He had found a way to explain it. He held his son in his lap, and as he spoke, he felt Buckley's small body on his knee-the very human, very warm, very alive weight of it. It comforted him. "The Scottie will be your piece from now on. Which piece is Susie's again?"

"The shoe?" Buckley asked.

"Right, and I'm the car, ~ Alice Sebold

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature. ~ Ernst Fischer

What bizarre things does not one find in a great city when one knows how to walk about and how to look! Life swarms with innocent monsters. Oh Lord my God, Thou Creator, Thou Master, Thou who hast made law and liberty, Thou the Sovereign who dost allow, Thou the Judge who dost pardon, Thou who art full of Motives and of Causes, Thou who hast (it may be) placed within my soul the love of horror in order to turn my hear to Thee, like the cure which follows the knife; Oh Lord, have pity, have pity upon the mad men and women that we are! Oh Creator, is it possible that monsters should exist in the eyes of Him alone who knoweth why they exist, how they have made themselves, and how they would have made themselves, and could not? ~ Charles Baudelaire

Poems are surmountable. They have rhymes and rhythms to help you make meaning. They're short enough. . . to read and reread until you've made some sense of them. Short stories are a different ballgame. You read them and understand the words completely. You know what happens in each sentence. You follow the dialogue and action. at the end, you know exactly what's happened. And also you have no idea. ~ Laurie Frankel

You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading. I'm not saying you shouldn't read such writers, some of whom are excellent and deserving of celebrity. I'm only pointing out that they represent the dot at the end of the long, glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written. ~ Francine Prose

The true elitists in the literary world are the ones who have become annoyed by literary ambition in any form, who have converted the very meaning of ambition so totally that it now registers as an act of disdain, a hostility to the poor common reader, who should never be asked to do anything that might lead to a pulled muscle. (What a relief to be told there's no need to bother with a book that might seem thorny, or abstract, or unusual.) The elitists are the ones who become angry when it is suggested to them that a book with low sales might actually deserve a prize ( ... ) and readers were assured that the low sales figures for some of the titles could only mean that the books had failed our culture's single meaningful literary test. ~ Ben Marcus

To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills. ~ George Steiner

Editors can be stupid at times. They just ignore that author's intention. I always try to read unabridged editions, so much is lost with cut versions of classic literature, even movies don't make sense when they are edited too much. I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author's mind, a glimpse of their creative soul. I mean, how would people like it if editors came along and said to an artist, 'Whoops, you left just a tad too much space around that lily pad there, lets crop that a bit, shall we?'. Monet would be ripping his hair out. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature ~ Julio Cortazar

I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant. ~ Aberjhani

Personal ministry is not about always knowing what to say. It is not about fixing everything in sight that is broken. Personal ministry is about connecting people with Christ so that they are able to think as he would have them think, desire what he says is best, and do what he calls them to do even if their circumstances never get "fixed." It involves exposing hurt, lost, and confused people to God's glory, so that they give up their pursuit of their own glory and live for his. ~ Paul David Tripp

Perhaps if by chance I was seen arranging the shop window in my underpants, some lady in need of strong literary emotions would be drawn in and inspired to part with a bit of hard cash. According to expert opinion, the future of literature depends on women and as God is my witness the female is yet to be born who can resist the allure of this stupendous physique. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Literature especially has an interesting relationship to photography - to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging ... taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You're riffing off of reality. ~ Larry Sultan

To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with. ~ Angela Carter

More interestingly, it could be argued that, if fantasy (and debatably the literature of the fantastic as a whole) has a purpose other than to entertain, it is to show readers how to perceive; an extension of the argument is that fantasy may try to alter readers' perception of reality. Of course, quack religions (etc.) make similar attempts, but a major difference is that, while the latter attempt to convert people to their codified way of thinking, the best fantasy introduces its readers into a playground of rethought perception, where there are no restrictions other than those of the human imagination. In some modes of the fantastic – e.g., magic realism and surrealism – the attempt to alter the reader's perception is overt, but most full-fantasy texts have at their core the urge to change the reader; that is, full fantasy is by definition a subversive literary form. ~ John Clute

I know it's highly unusual for people to get this excited over books. But if you're a reader, you get me . I don't need movies. I don't need TV. But books I can't live without books. To
me, a book is better than any movie. All I need is a good book, my imagination, and I am set free. I'm in literature heaven. And thank God, this may be the only thing that keeps me sane while we're here. ~ Belle Aurora

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life? ~ Aldous Huxley

It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol. ~ Pamela Dean

For the judging of contemporary literature the only test is one's personal taste. If you much like a new book, you must call it literature even though you find no other soul to agree with you, and if you dislike a book you must declare that it is not literature though a million voices should shout you that you are wrong. The ultimate decision will be made by Time. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I enjoy going on stage knowing that there's going to be that vulnerability and that transparency and hopefully things will be realized or accomplished or that confidence will be revealed. I think that's another element that people like about shows: in addition to hearing the songs that they love, I think there are some people who really get off on connecting with what's happening right now. ~ Jason Mraz

The pretentiousness of literature really annoys me; the way a writer is held as this sort of magical person to be revered on the stage. Everything I do on tour is to try and destroy that pretense. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Through the Social Enterprise Demonstration Fund, we are connecting high-potential social enterprises with the resources they need to grow and create jobs. This not only contributes to a fairer, more prosperous province; it also helps position Ontario as a global impact investment leader. ~ Brad Duguid

It's very difficult to balance different audiences and talk to each one without selling the others short. There is no universal literature - or, if there is, I don't know how to write it. ~ G. Willow Wilson

I found the offer of a knighthood something that I couldn't possibly accept. I found it to be somehow squalid, a knighthood. There's a relationship to government about knights. ~ Harold Pinter

Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper ... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.
The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.
speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962 ~ John Steinbeck

Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

She was addicted to literature like some people were addicted to heroin. ~ Allie Burke

Critical discussions of Western colonialism and imperialism and of what the term postcolonialism could mean, require, and enable first became acceptable in literature and cultural studies departments in the United States some three decades ago. Yet it has been much harder to create such discussions of sciences and technologies. Especially resistant are those departments where the West's scientific rationality and technical expertise have long been lovingly explained and "served up" for use in corporate and nationalist policies: sociology, philosophy, economics, and international relations, as well as the natural sciences themselves. ~ Sandra G. Harding

I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read. ~ Charles Kuralt