Life Literature Love Quotes

..Breaking yet budding,
dying yet living - standing
amongst ruins and rage,
reaching for possibilities
playing hard to get. ~ Meraaqi

Starving artist: starving for affection, starving for attention ~ Jessica-Lynn Barbour

Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other's hearts. I guess there's other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You're always home. ~ Eileen Myles

Often it's hard to differ pain and joy,
Some give up on differentiating ~ Zubair Ahsan

We dreamt of a crappy apartment somewhere
Making love while we let the midnight air
Flow through the open window, into our closed hearts
Left bitter from heartbreak and too much time apart ~ Jessica-Lynn Barbour

Death, like fiction, is brutal in its symmetry. Take this story and strip it down -all the way back- until you are left with two points. Two dots on a vast, blank canvas, separeted by a sea of white. Here, we have come to the first point, where the batj is drawn and the hand is reachinh for the razor blade. I will meet you at the next, by the axle of a screaming wheel, the revolution of a clock, the closing of an orbit. ~ Lang Leav

Say a day without the ever. ~ William Shakespeare

Deny everything and you will easily pass for a man of ability; it's a well known trick. Simple hearted people are quite ready to conclude that you are worth more than what you deny. And that's often an error. In the first place, you can pick holes in anything; and secondly, even if you are right in what you say, it's the worse for you, your intellect, directed by simple negation, grows colorless and withers up. While you gratify your vanity, you are deprived of the true consolations of thought;life--the essence of life--evades your jaundiced and petty criticism, and you end by scolding and becoming ridiculous. Only one who loves has the right to censure and find fault. ~ Ivan Turgenev

There's no way on God's green earth that I'm dressing up like Mr. Darcy." Brooks stretched out on Caroline's bed, hanging his suede wing tips off the edge and crossing his ankles. He laced his fingers behind his head and looked infuriatingly cool and relaxed.
"Not Mr. Darcy. That's the guy from Pride and Prejudice. You're supposed to come as Mr. Knightley. ~ Mary Jane Hathaway

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

The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature. ~ Rachel Cusk

Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies. ~ Northrop Frye

A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night, though he knew it was in God's power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy. ~ James Joyce

He turned the presidency – and the President's House – into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, of vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader life of the nation, from science to literature. ~ Jon Meacham

The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough ... People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself. ~ Doris Lessing

Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years
about twelve of them
to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted brain to take. Some of the parts must be sculpted at critical times. One cannot, after all, carve out toes unless he knows where the foot will go. We need tools to do some of the fine work. The tools are our childhood experiences. And I'm convinced that one of those experiences must be children's books. And they must be experienced within the early years of our long childhood. ~ E.L. Konigsburg

Without literature my life would be miserable. ~ Naguib Mahfouz

And now sometimes I'm interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,"look, look
at this!"
but they don't understand, they say something like,"you
say you've been influenced by Celine?"
no," I hold the cat up,"by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this! ~ Charles Bukowski

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career ~ Pat Conroy

Although I wasn't there to bear witness, I imagine Lot's wife scanned the masses for her children. Perhaps she sought out the curves of their mouths and the shapes of their faces, trying to memorize her children, grown now. She looked back as I and any strong, loving mother would have done. ~ Brenda Sutton Rose

Writing is a bittersweet addiction. The more it drains you; the more replenished you feel, and you crave it even more. ~ Anthea Syrokou

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again. ~ Rabih Alameddine

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life. ~ Paula Fox

It strikes me as somewhat odd that the people who use God's name most frequently, both in life and in literature, usually don't believe in him. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

The life of your body may be sustained by daily bread and rice, but the life of your soul may only be sustained by the fruit of wisdom. ~ Subhan Zein

Climbing Jacob's Ladder is a gutsy, glowing account of one man's encounter with a potent spiritual practice and how it transformed his life. This is a precious book - that rare combination of solid wisdom and good literature. ~ Larry Dossey

While in some countries there's a feeling that literature must stay away from religion, this is not so in India - in the Indian way, literature is just another means to find a more spiritual life, to find our way to God. ~ Amish Tripathi

The woman who appeals to a man's vanity may stimulate him, the woman who appeals to his heart may attract him, but it is the
woman who appeals to his imagination who gets him" – ~ Helen Rowland

There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship. ~ Bertrand Russell

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

How does Chekhov's artistic "programme" comment on the message of The Duel, and vice versa? I should like to be a free artist and nothing more, and I regret that God has not given me the power to be one. I hate lying and violence in all their forms ... Pharisaism, stupidity and despotism reign not in merchants' houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation ... That is why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. I regard trade-marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom - freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they may take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.* ~ Anton Chekhov

I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable
the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to bring them together and enjoy them together in full quantity. ~ Peter Greenaway

Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use
high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject
there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical. ~ Richard Rodriguez

great literature is literature that speaks to deep, fundamental human truths and experience in a way that is relatable to the reader and that may provoke engagement or facilitate insight into these truths and experiences. If these truths and experiences are about breaches of the normal, then surely horror has a place in literature, and in facts may proffer deep engagement with the most profound aspects of our existence. Sometimes only horror can say what needs to be said. ~ Jacob M. Held

Superstition is the poetry of life. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began. ~ John Dufresne

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things. ~ Marcel Proust