Literary Game Quotes

Writers, and the battery of critics, scholars, and publishers supporting them, would ignore or deny the commercial and symbolic interests which drive them, so involved are they in the literary game, and so accepting are they of its unspoken rules and premises (what Bourdieu calls the field's illusio). ~ John R.W. Speller

On the page, 'Gone Girl' was a literary game: a tennis match of alternating chapters from Nick and Amy, with the reader offering to take each character's side every few pages. ~ Richard Corliss

Bite my laughters, drink my tears. Pore into me, volumes, spell me stark and spill me swooning, I just don't care what my thwarters think. ~ James Joyce

I've won each and every game that I've played.
Won every opinion I've ever conveyed.
Won every debate, no matter the topic.
I once had a tie--I felt philanthropic."

Making a deal? It has no superior!
Building a wall? The rest are inferior.
"My wall will be numero uno primero.
I'll pay for it using another's dinero."

And there is the crux of the Americus Trumpus:
The swagger, the boasting, the oversized rump-us. ~ Michael Ian Black

Nobody's bigger than the game of baseball. You ask pitchers from 10-15-20 years ago. That's normal. Part of the game. ~ Ken Rosenthal

I could lie there as long as I wanted, and let all the pictures of things a man might want run through my head, coffee, a girl, money, a drink, white sand and blue water, and let them all slide off, one after another, like a deck of cards slewing slowly off your hand. Maybe the things you want are like cards. You don't want them for themselves, really, though you think you do. You don't want a card because you want the card, but because in a perfectly arbitrary system of rules and values and in a special combination of which you already hold a part the card has meaning. But suppose you aren't sitting in a game. Then, even if you do know the rules, a card doesn't mean a thing. They all look alike. ~ Robert Penn Warren

Where I lived at Pencey, I lived in the Ossenburger Memorial Wing of the new dorms. It was only for juniors and seniors. I was a junior. My roommate was a senior. It was named after this guy Ossenburger that went to Pencey. He made a pot of dough in the undertaking business after he got out of Pencey. What he did, he started these undertaking parlors all over the country that you could get members of your family buried for about five bucks apiece. You should see old Ossenburger. He probably just shoves them in a sack and dumps them in the river. Anyway, he gave Pencey a pile of dough, and they named our wing alter him. The first football game of the year, he came up to school in this big goddam Cadillac, and we all had to stand up in the grandstand and give him a locomotive - that's a cheer. Then, the next morning, in chapel, he made a speech that lasted about ten hours. He started off with about fifty corny jokes, just to show us what a regular guy he was. Very big deal. Then he started telling us how he was never ashamed, when he was in some kind of trouble or something, to get right down his knees and pray to God. He told us we should always pray to God - talk to Him and all - wherever we were. He told us we ought to think of Jesus as our buddy and all. He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me. I can just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs. The only good part of ~ J.D. Salinger

Ladies and Gentlemen, your history starts with your mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. You may be swimming against the stream, or you may be holding on to those very roots, but whatever you are doing, you are never without them. Your lives are a reaction to them, good or bad; every love story contains six people from the very beginning, in one form or another. Replicate them, get rid of them, but they existed, and cutting off their influence is a lifelong struggle that not all of us survive wholeheartedly. ~ Laura Gentile

Carol would not be a bad one to [settle down] with. She's pretty and bright, and maybe this is what love is. She's good company: her interests broaden almost every day. She reads three books to my one, and I read a lot. We talk far into the night. She still doesn't understand the first edition game: Hemingway, she says, reads just as well in a two-bit paperback as he does in a $500 first printing. I can still hear myself lecturing her the first time she said that. Only a fool would read a first edition. Simply having such a book makes life in general and Hemingway in particular go better when you do break out the reading copies. I listened to myself and thought, This woman must think I'm a government-inspected horse's ass. Then I showed her my Faulkners, one with a signature, and I saw her shiver with an almost sexual pleasure as she touched the paper where he signed. Faulkner was her most recent god[.] ~ John Dunning

In terms of the economics, yes obviously the rise of e-books and how people choose to read books has a big effect on the economics of the game. But whether people are buying them on paper or downloading them there's still some poor wretch in a room who is trying to write a poem, write a story, write a novel. And so my job doesn't change. It's just how people receive it and economic conditions on the ground change, but that doesn't affect what I write. ~ Colson Whitehead

I broke into shakespeare's tomb and stole his remains, grinded the bones, smoked it, then got in the game ~ Nas

Don't hate the player, Todd, hate the game. ~ Josh Mathews

When I retire I'm gonna bet on Wolves drawing every game. I'll be a multi-millionaire! ~ Paul Ince

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

Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel's publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw
that she fell in love with her own creation in a way that shows a lack of artistic control and is even unseemly, like a hoary movie director whose lens lingers too long on the young flesh of a favored actress. Lord David Cecil calls Ladislaw 'a schoolgirl's dream, and a vulgar one at that,' while Leslie Stephen complained 'Ladislaw is almost obtrusively a favorite with his creator,' and depreciated him as 'an amiable Bohemian. ~ Rebecca Mead

Little by little, wean yourself. This is the gist of what I have to say. From an embryo whose nourishment comes in the blood, move to an infant drinking milk, to a child on solid food, to a searcher after wisdom, to a hunter of invisible game. ~ Rumi

Let no man think that the fire of the Targaryens did not burn in his veins. ~ George R.R. Martin

Personally, it's changed my game - it's how I think now. Can't imagine writing more than a paragraph in anything that doesn't do MMD. ~ Merlin Mann

Now, his hair is white and he no longer understands anyone's need to love, for he has lost everything, not to love, but to his games of love; and when you love as a game, you lose everything, as he lost his home and wife, and now he clings to me, afraid of loss, afraid of solitude. ~ Anais Nin

I've always wanted to get involved with designing a video game. ~ Jimmie Johnson

If there is anything that puzzles me in this game, it is that the longer that you are in the job of prime minister, the harder you have to work to do your job. With anything else ... you get to know the ropes pretty well and it becomes easy. I feel the more you know, the more you have to know and the more problems come at you. It is certainly not because I do not delegate. ~ Pierre Trudeau

When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book's plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body of flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way. A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot, makes it less fearful by containing it in a kind of game format. [from an interview with DeCurtis] ~ Don DeLillo

I have bitten down or swallowed a few pellets through the years. My uncle had his appendix removed and there were over 100 lead pellets in it. He might have died of lead poisoning. Now that is eating a lot of game! ~ Phil Robertson

I slipped the envelope into it, there in the wide lower corridor of the Arts Building with people passing me on the way to classes, on the way to have a smoke and maybe a game of bridge in the Common Room. On their way to deeds they didn't know they had in them. ~ Alice Munro

If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it's too late! ~ Michael Chabon

I do not understand normalcy. You have to be out of your mind to think outside the box. You need to think outside the box to make real change. Why remain a spectator when you can own the game? ~ Eniitan Akinola

Every answer can be followed by another question. ~ Thomas Lloyd Qualls

'Blasto' is a new game for Sony Playstation. It's an awesome three-dimensional game, and I play the character Blasto who's sort of a Flash Gordon barrel-chested superhero who goes to Uranus and shoots these little green alien Fascist guys. He rescues babes; he goes on wild rides. ~ Phil Hartman

Just like the notion of "Internet natives", who have never known a world without Internet access, we, who have lived our entire lives with video games, can be known as "video game natives. ~ Alexei Maxim Russell

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers ... What we call art is a game. ~ Octavio Paz

A literary work ... is, during the time one reads it, a friend with whom one has chosen to spend one's time. The question now is, what does this friendship do to my mind? What does this new friend ask me to notice, to desire, to care about? How does he or she invite me to view my fellow human beings? ~ Wayne C. Booth

I think Curtis is finally getting his drive back, his passion for the game, ... I think he's starting to enjoy that competition again. That's what drives us all out here that feeling of being able to hit a good shot in a tough situation. ~ Jay Haas

Albert had created a currency based on gold bullets and McDonald's game pieces. He'd wanted to call the currency something else, but no one remembered what. So, 'Bertos they were, a play on "Albert," coined by Howard, of course, who had also come up with "the FAYZ" to describe their weird little world.
Sam had thought Albert was nuts with his obsession with creating money. But the evidence was in: Albert's system was producing just enough food for kids to survive. And a lot more kids were working. Far fewer were just hanging out. It was no longer impossible to get kids to go into the fields and do the backbreaking work of picking crops. They worked for 'Bertos and spent 'Bertos, and for now at least starvation was just a bad memory. ~ Michael Grant

The pleasure was in the staging, the idea of ourselves as a repetition of others. I knew this without saying it, felt my femininity as the game of all women, a mysterious identification in which I lost myself. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by M. C. Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever. ~ David Mitchell

We can't win the struggle for high standards if we just talk a good game ... we've got to play a good game. ~ Price Pritchett

I had to figure out myself to figure out my game. ~ Stewart Cink

In those years, it was easier to win the Soviet Championship than a game against 'Iron Tigran'. ~ Lev Polugaevsky

When did your childhood end? How badly did you get hurt, when you did, when you were this little wee little hurtable thing, nothing but big eyes, a heart, a few hundred words? Isn't it wonderful how we never recover? Injuries and wounds, ladies and gents. Slights and abuses, oh, what a paradise. Living in fear, suiting the hurt to our need. What a happy life. What a good game. Who can stand the most, the most life, and still smile, still grin into the coming night and say more, more, encore, encore, you fuckers, you fates, just give me more of the bloody bloody same. ~ Will Eno

People often refer to my career before The Crying Game as something which led up to that point. But I was very fulfilled in what I was doing. ~ Stephen Rea

If Parliament were to consider the sporting with reputation of as much importance as sporting on manors, and pass an act for the preservation of fame as well as game, there are many who would thank them for the bill. ~ Richard Brinsley Sheridan

In this country, people buy T-shirts extolling their survival skills after snowstorms and heat waves. I used to get angry about this behavior, which I considered to be a childish display of false endurance. How can a country be so weak to think that a little snow or a little spike in a thermometer is actual hardship? But now … I'm almost pleased to see these T-shirts appear every few years. Now they indicate to me that this country is so secure and wealthy that actual hardship for many is almost impossible. These celebrations of minor calamities are in essence a signal that the people of this country feel so safe that they've turned survival into a silly game. Unfortunately, most nations are not like the United States. Danger is real for almost everyone most anywhere else. ~ Stuart Rojstaczer

My first big mistake was made when, in a moment of weakness, I consented to learn the game; for a man who can frankly say "I do not play bridge" is allowed to go over in the corner and run the pianola by himself, while the poor neophyte, no matter how much he may protest that he isn't "at all a good player, in fact I'm perfectly rotten," is never believed, but dragged into a game where it is discovered, too late, that he spoke the truth. ~ Robert Benchley

You going to the game tonight?"
I was about to answer,but another voice rang out from just behind me.
"She'd better," Jack said as he wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me back against him. I could smell the fresh leather on his letterman jacket as I crunched against it.
"Why is that?" I asked,smiling and instantly warm in his arms.I still couldn't get over the fact that Jack Caputo and I were...together. It was hard to think the word. We had been friends for so long.To be honest, he had been friends with me and I had been secretly pining for him since...well, since forever.
But now he was here. It was my waist he held. It didn't seem real.
"I can't carry the team to victory without you," he said. "You're my rabbit's foot."
I craned my neck around to look at him. "I've always dreamed of some guy saying that to me."
He pressed his lips to the base of my neck, and heat rushed to my cheeks. "I love making you turn red," he whispered.
"It doesn't take much. We're in the middle of the hallway."
"You want to know what else I love?" His tone was playful.
"No," I said, but he wasn't listening. He took his fingers and lightly railed them up my spine,to the back of my neck.Instant goose bumps sprang up all over my body,and I shuddered.
"That."
I could feel his smile against my ear. Jack was always smiling.It was what made him so likable.
By this time,Jules had snaked her way through the throng of students. "Hello, ~ Brodi Ashton

In literary translations, it is this very articulation of expressions that matters the most to bring home to the readers the full essence of the original text in question. ~ Suman Pokhrel

I think that man was half-right. He is better off out of the game - but the game may not be better off without him. A man should not exist for himself alone. Life made an investment in him, and that investment was not paid off. ~ Piers Anthony

Hunt game? With pearl-handled revolvers?" I asked, incredulous. "Isn't that a bit ... I dunno ... fancy? Do I just run out into the forest with my pearl-handled revolvers, or do I invite some deer to a cocktail party and then gun them down? ~ Jeff VanderMeer

I could always throw the ball pretty well and I worked pretty hard at learning how to play the game. But I didn't consider it work as a kid, since I just loved playing baseball. ~ Jim Abbott