Filipino Literature Quotes

The mind can also be kind and does blot out those episodes of our existence that we can't erase in our consciousness. ~ F. Sionil Jose

I have tried to be very rational, although I know love and hate are not rational and explained feelings. ~ F. Sionil Jose

If you are doing whatever a shepherd is ordering you to do, then you are a real sheep, a poor submissive being! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives; - that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

The Gospels were not thought of as works of literature. People were not concerned with the literary reputation of Matthew or Mark, but with the substance of their records of our Lord's life. They did not have to respect their actual words, as they would if they were transcribing the works of Thucydides or Plato. ~ Frederic G. Kenyon

Literature is about as unnecessarily necessarily as tableware or ironed shirts. ~ Peter Bichsel

I like art, and by art I mean music, poetry, sex, paintings, the human body, literature… All of this is art to me. ~ Hunter Reveur

Literature is so common a luxury that the age has grown fastidious. ~ Henry Theodore Tuckerman

Some of these Marines learned what they know on Guadalcanal, a basically useless island in the Southwest Pacific where the Empire of Nippon and the United States of America are disputing - with rifles - each other's right to build a military airbase. Early returns suggest that the Nipponese Army, during its extended tour of East Asia, has lost its edge. It would appear that raping the entire female population of Nanjing, and bayoneting helpless Filipino villagers, does not translate into actual military competence. The Nipponese Army is still trying to work out some way to kill, say, a hundred American Marines without losing, say, five hundred of its own soldiers. ~ Neal Stephenson

But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless - a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn't much time left over for emotion recollected in tranquillity. ~ Jay McInerney

If the detective should suffer overmuch from the artistic temperament, and his fellow lodger should dwell overlong upon the fairness of a wrist or the timber of a feminine voice, so much the better for us. Literature never produced a relationship more symbiotic nor a warmer and more timeless friendship. ~ Loren D. Estleman

Serving time doesn't make you fit to do anything but serve more time. ~ Donald Hays

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination. ~ Charles Simic

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully. ~ Robert Metcalfe

The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him. ~ R.M. Engelhardt

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
[Kung Fu Monkey
Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009] ~ John Rogers

I recreate myself; that is my only power. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

In literature there is no such thing as a pure thought; in literature, thought is always the handmaid of emotion. ~ J. Middleton Murry

People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker! ~ Mary Gordon

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Politics is the great generalizer and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other---they are in an antagonistic relationship. ~ Philip Roth

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Swinging first and swinging to kill is all that matters now. ~ Ernie Pyle

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

Ari's words felt like drops of sunlight upon my skin, and my frame was burning with longing. ~ Petra March

A way a lone a last a loved a long the - ~ James Joyce

When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies. ~ Irvine Welsh

Yet, the principle of uncertainty is a bad name. In science or outside of it, we are not uncertain. Our knowledge is merely confined within a certain tolerance. We should call it the principle of tolerance. First in the engineering sense. Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge, all information, between human beings, can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance, and that's whether it's in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of though that aspires to dogma. ~ Jacob Bronowski

I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think. ~ Franz Kafka

The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class. ~ John Edward Williams

Literature is the stringing together of pictures in words. ~ Thomas Kinkade

Young poets are too apt to consider themselves "children of the mist" – they must dwell apart from men and contemn their kind, or they fear they shall be only taken for common-place characters. They forget that poetry is the language which speaks to all hearts - and that instead of cherishing the sacred fire as a lonely light, as one that burns in a charnel house, they should bring it forth in its beauty and brightness as a guide to the pleasant places and sparkling waters of earth's happiness and the radiant messenger of heaven's exalted hopes. And they should rejoice and be glad that to them the kindling of such high imagination is given.

~ Sarah Josepha Hale
Ladies Magazine, November 1830

From the Introduction to Cherishing the Sacred Fire ~ Deborah L. Halliday

It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost. Never questions his own madness might not in fact be unfeigned. ~ David Foster Wallace

Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence. ~ Herbert Read

The name Patrick Modiano drew a blank in the States when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. But in Paris, his home city, his many novels (more than thirty) are read, the screenplay he wrote for Louis Malle's masterpiece Lacombe, Lucien remains a favorite, and the songs he wrote for Françoise Hardy you hear in cafés and on the radio. Still, Modiano, as man and artist, remains a mystery man. The search for phantoms of history is his basic plotline, the searches as well as the enigmatic love stories, all of which take place along the streets of Paris. ~ Susan Cahill

It is not opinions that man needs: it is TRUTH. It is not theology; it is God. It is not religion: it is Christ. It is not literature and science; but the knowledge of the free love of God in the gift of His only-begotten Son. ~ Horatius Bonar

Once he has outgrown his youth, a man will rarely remain a prisoner to his insolence. He had thought it was the only way to behave; then he suddenly discovers that, even for a prince, there are such things as music, literature, not to speak of standing for the post of deputy. ~ Marcel Proust

...and I shambled after as usual as I've been doing all my life after people that interest me, because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yearn or say a commonplace thing ... but burn, burn, burn like Roman candles across the night. ~ Ann Charters

Humans are untouchable in the eyes of the October House. Humankind is to be protected, at all costs. Anything or anyone who chooses to deviate from it is the enemy. Always. ~ Ilse V. Rensburg

The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world. ~ H.L. Mencken

The same tantalizing guile and sublime skill ... [The series is] reinforced in its claim to be one of the major literary works of this century ... Only two other writers that this reviewer can think of have each created an entire, discrete and compelling world, a totally believable entity which one might wish to inhabit, and they are Joyce and Proust. It is not pretentious to place Patrick O'Brian in the first canon of literature ... ~ Kevin Myers

Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional. ~ Stacy Schiff

You're not going to find her on the cover of a magazine. She's more the kind you find at a museum, on a painting or in a piece of literature. Her beauty is in her soul. ~ J.M. Darhower

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest. ~ Charles Dickens