Dutch Literature Quotes

...Sigerius realized that every academic looked like every other academic."
- Bonita Avenue, p.49 ~ Peter Buwalda

Literature is inexhaustible, with every book a homage to infinity ~ Bertrand Russell

There's a reason every book, even one that isn't very serious, is shaped like a suitcase ~ Sergei Dovlatov

[He] taught me many things: how to create a sentence, how to think about language and all its devices as an orchestra and search of a musical score, how to analyze a text and understand how it is constructed and why... He taught me to read and write again, but this time I knew what I was doing, why, and what for. And above all how. He never tired of telling me that in literature there is only one real theme: not what is narrated, but how it is narrated. The rest, he said, was decoration. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word: Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of 'text' repeats the notion of 'literature': literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language). ~ Roland Barthes

Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites ... some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way. ~ Tony Kushner

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful. ~ H.G.Wells

I was a wannabe who was actually unable to write because I had nothing to say, who wasn't honest enough with himself to draw the appropriate conclusions and was therefore trying to get a foot in the world of literature at any cost. Not as someone who created something himself, someone who wrote and was published, but as a parasite, as someone who wrote as others wrote, a second-rater. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

One of my major preoccupations is the approximation between what I say and what I do, between what I seem to be and what I am actually becoming. ~ Paulo Freire

A story is an end in itself. It is not written to teach, sell, explain or destroy anything. It is not written even to entertain. It is written as a man is born - an organic whole, dictated only by its own laws and its own necessity - an end in itself, not a means to an end. ~ Ayn Rand

Messages written across the chest of women's t-shirts are great, because I can stare at their tits like they are literature. ~ Jarod Kintz

My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads. ~ Charles Baxter

If we want to be sincere, we must admit that there is a well-nourished love and an ill-nourished love. And the rest is literature. ~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged. ~ Marilyn Hacker

I wanted to hug them all. We belonged to each other somehow...But that sweet feeling hung on and I loved all of Harlem gently and didn't want to be Puerto Rican or anything else but my own rusty self. ~ Louise Meriwether

I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish poetry and other Eastern European poetry and reading Russian poetry and reading Latin American and Spanish poetry and I've always found models in those other poetries of poets who could help me on my path. ~ Edward Hirsch

Being in an M.F.A. is like living in a sci-fi biosphere on an alien planet, where everyone shares your obscure visionary notions: namely, that literature matters, that English professors know more than other people, that typing, alone, in a library, is what everyone should be doing on a Friday night. Better to tell strangers that speaking Klingon is what turns you on. ~ Adam Johnson

I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. ~ Henry David Thoreau

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. ~ Franz Kafka

It was Crabcalf who, surrounded and walled in by the hundreds of unsold copies of his ill-fated novel, felt that he if anyone should be the judge not only of literature, but all that went on behind the sordid scenes. ~ Mervyn Peake

The study of social progress is today not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart. ~ Alfred De Vigny

If you could have walked on the planet before humans lived here, maybe the Ivory Coast would have seemed more beautiful than La Côte d'Azur. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean. ~ Karl Kraus

If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people. ~ John Jay Chapman

Words, to me, are the same as an instrument is to a musician. I never know where this typewriter is going to take me until I begin. I never know what I'm feeling until I read over what I have written. ~ Tessa Emily Hall

I wanted to be the Dutch Bruce Jenner - that was my goal. He was my hero. ~ Bas Rutten

When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her name was to be in the title of the story, it almost always worked. Then, later, when we'd passed a night of delicious love-making together, after she'd gone and I'd felt that feeling of happiness mixed with sorrow, I sometimes would write a book or story about her. Sometimes her character, her way about herself, her love-making, it sometimes marked me so heavily that I couldn't go on in life and be happy unless I wrote a book or a story about that woman, the happy and sad memory of that woman. That was the only way to keep her, and to say goodbye to her without her ever leaving. ~ Roman Payne

Literature takes reality and human experience as its starting point, transforms it by means of the imagination, and sends readers back to life with renewed understanding of it and zest for it because of their excursions into a purely imaginary realm. ~ Leland Ryken

Persecution mania is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera. ~ Joseph Brodsky

The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply. ~ Anne Rice

We have very pretty Dutch gardens, so called, in America, but their chief claim to being Dutch is that they are set with bulbs, and have Delft or other earthen pots or boxes for formal plants or shrubs. ~ Alice Morse Earle

Maybe at the very bottom of it ... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who will ... who obsessed the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him. ~ Steven Weinberg

Moreover, people invariably take a greater interest in the suffering of others than in their well-being. Hence writers must constantly fight against the most tempting of all tempatations-to advertise their misfortunes. Indeed, the greatest misfortune that can happen to a writer is to work in an environment where touting one's misfortunes passes for literature. ~ Minae Mizumura

One of my rules is never to look sideways at what other people are doing but instead, do what I feel is right. ~ Annie Bryant

I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree. ~ Honore De Balzac

Ground) - "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her" - has entered our literature and our consciousness. This episode ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course – I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother's front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I had married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature. ~ Mary Karr

When I came overseas, I realized that there are many ideologies and many trends, and it's also very hard to produce honest art and honest literature. I decided that I didn't want to follow any of these ideologies or trends, because that's also a kind of pressure that doesn't allow absolute freedom. So I decided that I was only going to produce works that were satisfactory to me, and that meant not following any trends and being anti-ideological. ~ Gao Xingjian

If circumstances should make it impossible (temporarily, I hope) for me to be a Russian writer, perhaps I shall be able, like the Pole Joseph Conrad, to become for a time an English writer ... ("Letter To Stalin") ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

There are lots of unlikable characters in literature. It doesn't mean they're not fascinating. ~ Lynne Tillman

I am gone tomorrow. And there and gone again by the time you read this. ~ Salvador Plascencia