Literary Reference Quotes

The question is which one of us is the frog and which is the toad,' Willem had said after they'd first seen the show, in JB's studio, and read the kindhearted books to each other late that night, laughing helplessly as they did.
He'd smiled; they had been lying in bed. 'Obviously, I'm the toad,' he said.
'No,' Willem said, 'I think you're the frog; your eyes are the same color as his skin.'
Willem sounded so serious that he grinned. 'That's your evidence?' he asked. 'And so what do you have in common with the toad?'
'I think I actually have a jacket like the one he has,' Willem said, and they began laughing again. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Psalm 29:10 is another reminiscent literary reference to the ancient Egyptian heritage of the Jews' cow-worship faith ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish is elaborated into its pure form, self-valorizing value, money breeding money, and in this form no longer bears any marks of its origin. The social relation is consummated in the relationship of a thing, money, to itself ... Capital is now a thing, but the thing is capital. The money's body is now by love possessed.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, p. 516-517, containing a literary reference at the end there to Goethe, Faust, Part I. The context is Marx's discussion of how the commodity fetish's obfuscation of the true relations of capitalist production (i.e. the exploitation of labor) reaches its epitome in the form of interest-bearing capital (i.e. finance capital). ~ Karl Marx

Occasionally, especially at celebratory times, the whole gang of us would launch into a spontaneous mental game. For example, my mother used to send me to the back porch (a room containing no furniture but a simply incredible mass of Stuff) to get flour for holiday cakes or pies. I often returned to the kitchen, cringing with disgust, to announce that the flour was full of worms. No matter how sick this made me, I knew it wuoldn't bother my mother. She always just sifted the worms out, saying that even if she missed a few and they got into the food, they would simply be an excellent source of protein. Just as we were all beginning to feel thoroughly downtrodden, my father would save the day. "Everyone come up with a literary reference about worms!" he would shout. ~ Martha N. Beck

I thought you didn't like animals."
"I love animals. Where did you get that idea?" Marmie put her paws on his leg, and he picked her up.
"From my dog?"
"That's a dog? Jeez, I'm sorry. I thought it was an industrial-waste accident." His long, lean fingers slid through the cat's fur.
"Slytherin." She slapped the lid back onto the flour container. What kind of man liked a cat more than he liked an exceptionally fine French poodle?
"What did you call me?"
"It's a literary reference. You wouldn't understand."
"Harry Potter. And I don't appreciate name calling. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

The photo had been taken at the opening of JB's fifth, long-delayed show, 'Frog and Toad,' which had been exclusively images of the two of them, but very blurred, and more abstract than JB's previous work. (They hadn't quite known what to think of the series title, though JB had claimed it was affectionate. 'Arnold Lobel?' he had screeched at them when they asked him about it. 'Hello?!' But neither he nor Willem had read Lobel's books as children, and they'd had to go out and buy them to make sense of the reference.) ~ Hanya Yanagihara

I'm always collecting emotions for future reference. ~ Harlan Howard

Many moral advances have taken the form of a shift in sensibilities that made an action seem more ridiculous than sinful, such as dueling, bullfighting, and jingoistic war. And many effective social critics, such as Swift, Johnson, Voltaire, Twain, Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Tom Lehrer, and George Carlin have been smart-ass comedians rather than thundering prophets. What in our psychology allows the joke to be mightier than the sword?

Humor works by confronting an audience with an incongruity, which may be resolved by switching to another frame of reference. And in that alternative frame of reference, the butt of the joke occupies a lowly or undignified status. ...

Humor with a political or moral agenda can stealthily challenge a relational model that is second nature to an audience by forcing them to see that it leads to consequences that the rest of their minds recognize as absurd. ...

According to the 18th-century writer Mary Wortley Montagu, 'Satire should, like a polished razor keen / Wound with touch that's scarcely felt or seen.' But satire is seldom polished that keenly, and the butts of a joke may be all too aware of the subversive power of humor. They may react with a rage that is stoked by the intentional insult to a sacred value, the deflation of their dignity, and a realization that laughter indicates common knowledge of both. The lethal riots in 2005 provoked by the editorial cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ( ~ Steven Pinker

Oh no, this was real. And it just went to show that her secret weakness in literary escapism did not translate well into reality. The last thing she needed or wanted in real life was a bonded alpha male. Romantic fiction aside, they were serious jackass material. ~ Trisha McCallan

Writing a book is like dating. It's exciting. It's dreamy. And after four years, I just want to end it. ~ Carole Radziwill

Inevitably, the flood of literary pornography loosed on us is dulling our reactions of surprise or shock. Its writers are forced to raise the ante, to provide stronger and stronger stimulants. Or try to provide them, since both the manner, the naming of parts and the few inexpressive four-letter words, and the matter, are narrowly limited. ~ Storm Jameson

Male urination is a form of commentary. ~ Camille Paglia

Where once his grandparents put up crucifixes and images of the benediction on their walls, he and Reine-Marie put up books on theirs. History books. Reference books. Biographies. Fiction, nonfiction. Stories lined the walls and both insulated them from the outside world and connected them to it. ~ Louise Penny

To sum up. A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him. I say this of the plongeur because it is his case I have been considering; it would apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These are only my own Ideas about the basic facts of a plongeur's life, made without reference to immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present them as a sample of the thoughts that are put into one's head by working in a hotel. ~ George Orwell

Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere. ~ Tommy Orange

Guilt is a feeble emotion. It surrenders too easily ~ Deborah McKinlay

Hone your writing skills as if they were your finest weapons of war. For in the literary arena, your pen will truly be your sword. ~ Max Hawthorne

The Romantic journey was usually a solitary one. Although the Romantic poets were closely connected with one another, and some collaborated in their work, they each had a strong individual vision. Romantic poets could not continue their quests for long or sustain their vision into later life. The power of the imagination and of inspiration did not last. Whereas earlier poets had patrons who financed their writing, the tradition of patronage was not extensive in the Romantic period and poets often lacked financial and other support. Keats, Shelley and Byron all died in solitary exile from England at a young age, their work left incomplete, non-conformists to the end. This coincides with the characteristic Romantic images of the solitary heroic individual, the spiritual outcast 'alone, alone, all, all alone' like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and John Clare's 'I'; like Shelley's Alastor, Keats's Endymion, or Byron's Manfred, who reached beyond the normal social codes and normal human limits so that 'his aspirations/Have been beyond the dwellers of the earth'. Wordsworth, who lived to be an old man, wrote poems throughout his life in which his poetic vision is stimulated by a single figure or object set against a natural background. Even his projected final masterpiece was entitled The Recluse. The solitary journey of the Romantic poet was taken up by many Victorian and twentieth-century poets, becoming almost an emblem of the individual's search for identity in an ever more confu ~ Ronald Carter

Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you've had enough of them to provide reference. ~ Donald Miller

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.
[Time Magazine, October 31, 1977] ~ John Osborne

Thus we see, that the mind can undergo many changes, and can pass sometimes to a state of greater perfection, sometimes to a state of lesser perfection. These passive states of transition explain to us the emotions of pleasure and pain. By pleasure therefore in the following propositions I shall signify a passive state wherein the mind passes to a greater perfection. By pain I shall signify a passive state wherein the mind passes to a lesser perfection. Further, the emotion of pleasure in reference to the body and mind together I shall call stimulation (titillatio) or merriment (hilaritas), the emotion of pain in the same relation I shall call suffering or melancholy. But we must bear in mind, that stimulation and suffering are attributed to man, when one part of his nature is more affected than the rest, merriment and melancholy, when all parts are alike affected. What I mean by desire I have explained in the note to Prop. ix. of this part; beyond these three I recognize no other primary emotion; I will show as I proceed, that all other emotions arise from these three. ~ Baruch Spinoza

As the sun went down outside, the television screen started completely lighting up the room in obnoxiously bright colors at hyperactive speeds. The conversation had been slowly rising in volume and frequency, as everyone started becoming more delinquent and the social boundaries slowly wore away.
I don't remember what any of them said because I wasn't honestly paying any attention. I was focusing on my own misery and trying to numb the inner demons, the ugly things Thomas claimed came from the Outside World. Yet, to me, it wasn't outside, but rather INSIDE, as in my own head. I kept hearing Charley's voice from bits and pieces of conversations we had, laughter that I'll never hear ever again. ~ J.C. Joranco

My friends call me 'Dolittle One' [a reference to her physical stature and affinity for animals]. ~ Gloria Estefan

War can so easily be gilt with romance and heroism and solemn national duty and patriotism and the like by persons whose superficial literary and oratorical talent covers an abyss of Godforsaken folly. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages ~ Isabel Allende

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

When God lets loose a great thinker on this planet, then all things are at risk. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; nor any literary reputation or the so-called eternal names of fame that many not be refused and condemned. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

In the true Literary Man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness: he is the light of the world; the world's Priest;
guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time. ~ Thomas Carlyle

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous "turn" (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially "escapist," nor "fugitive." In its fairy-tale--or otherworld--setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the "turn" comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality ... In such stories when the sudden "turn" comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Mysteries and thrillers are not the same things, though they are literary siblings. Roughly put, I would say the distinction is that mysteries emphasize motive and psychology whereas thrillers rely more heavily on action and plot. ~ Jon Meacham

I've been told that I cannot change shit, so I might as well stop torturing myself. My emotions are ridiculed and branded as childish. I have been told that the world has given up on my people. I have been told, and realise that on many occasions, I myself am viewed as an outcast by some of those suffering. I've been confronted and my answer is always the same: I care even in my most fucked-up moments. I care even when gates of shit pour open to drown me; I care because I am a citizen of the world. ~ Asaad Almohammad

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den. ~ Phillip Adams

I do not come out of a literary tradition. ~ Richard Flanagan

The Golden Bough captured the imagination of many artists in the early twentieth century. Eliot, certainly, was immersed in it, discussing it familiarly in his graduate school papers and book reviews and constantly alluding to it in his art. The most straightforward advice he offers to readers of The Waste Land (given in the notes to the poem) is, in paraphrase, that any serious reader of the poem must take into consideration modern scholarship in myth and anthropology, especially Frazer Golden Bough and Jessie Weston From Ritual to Romance. The poet says that he is indebted to this scholarship for his title, his plan, his symbolism, and many of his references to ancient religion and society. His claim about the title, taken from the monomyth of Frazer and Weston, his claim about the symbolism, associated with the birth-death-rebirth cycles of the myths, and his claim about the miscellaneous undergirding references have been discussed by Grover Smith and other scholars. We wish to focus more on Eliot's claim about being indebted to Frazer for the plan of the poem. We believe it refers, at least in part, to Frazer's use of the comparative method and to his practice of assembling many perspectives and allowing these perspectives to make his point.

It must be noted at once that Eliot was quite selective in his admiration of Frazer. For example, he did not admire Frazer's positivism. Frazer put his faith in science and celebrated what he called the evolution from magic ~ Jewel Spears Brooker

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. ~ Douglas R. Hofstadter

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he'd replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he'd kept that job? ~ Christopher Hitchens

Every single day I have missed you. I grieve for the moments we have had together and I long for the moments we will never have. ~ Kristin Maddock

To vest a few fallible men - prosecutors, judges, jurors - with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J.S. Mill called the "moral police" is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products ... If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do otherwise to a work of a genius. Originality, not too plentiful, should be cherished, not stifled. An author's imagination may be cramped if he must write with an eye on prosecutors or juries ... ~ Jerome Frank

He would have died rather quickly to not lose track of his wife in the afterlife. ~ Laura Gentile

In my twenties, it was so important for me to show people I had all these other books and these other sorts of writing in me, .. A lot of authors, if their first book is a success, they're terrified to write a second one. But in my case, since the first book wasn't considered a literary book, I was really determined to show people I could do other types of writing. ~ Evelyn Lau

Like … most of the school has figured out you're gay." "Oh. Interesting. I haven't met most of the school, so don't know how they managed that." "Yeah, but…" I knew what he was getting at. It was fine. Whatever. It's not like it was a state secret or anything. And hey, if people guessed, it saved me having to have a discussion about my sexual preferences with people who didn't even know if I preferred ham or peanut butter on my sandwiches. For reference, the answer was, "both, simultaneously. ~ Sophie Gonzales

Past misdeeds must only serve as a reference point in calm conversation about lessons learned or actions that taught us to behave better. They should never be bantered about with sarcasm, anger, or nastiness. ~ Cathy Burnham Martin

While much recent historicist criticism has assumed early nineteenth-century readers attuned to subtle ideological nuances in poetry, actual responses from readers often come closer to clulessness ... It is no surprise that no one understood Blake, but other poets fared not much better ... Coleridge's 'Christabel' was 'the standing enigma which puzzles the curiosity of literary circles. What is it all about?', while another reviewer asked about Shelley, 'What, in the name of wonder on one side, and of common sense on the other, is the meaning of this metaphysical rhapsody about the unbinding of Prometheus?'. Even Keats was condemned for 'his frequent obscurity and confusion of language' and his 'unintelligible quaintness'. Byron, never to be outdone, boasted in 'Don Juan' that not only did he not understand many of his fellow poets, he did not understand himself either: 'I don't pretend that I quite understand / My own meaning when I would be very fine.' ... ~ Andrew Elfenbein

Serious occupation is labor that has reference to some want. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to
Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?
They had reached the end of the gallery, and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room. ~ Jane Austen

I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of men. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nom de Plume uses the device of the pseudonym to unite the likes of Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain, Fernando Pessoa, and Patricia Highsmith into a cohesive yet highly idiosyncratic literary history. Each page affords sparkling facts and valuable insights onto the manufacturing of books and reputations, the keeping and revealing of secrets, the vagaries of private life and public opinion, and the eternally mysterious, often tormented interface between life and literature. ~ Elif Batuman

I've often taken important classical, biblical or literary stories and interrogated them. I have tried to reinvigorate Lot by interpreting it differently. ~ Howard Barker

For the various spiritual forms of the imagination have a natural affinity with certain sensuous forms of art - and to discern the qualities of each art, to intensify as well its limitations as its powers of expression, is one of the aims that culture sets before us. It is not an increased moral sense, an increased moral supervision that your literature needs. Indeed, one should never talk of a moral or an immoral poem - poems are either well written or badly written, that is all. And, indeed, any element of morals or implied reference to a standard of good or evil in art is often a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision, often a note of discord in the harmony of an imaginative creation; for all good work aims at a purely artistic effect. 'We must be careful,' said Goethe, 'not to be always looking for culture merely in what is obviously moral. Everything that is great promotes civilisation as soon as we are aware of it. ~ Oscar Wilde

I do not admire Flaubert, yet when I am told that by his own admission all he hoped to accomplish in in Salammbo was to 'give the impression of the color yellow' and in Madame Bovary 'to do something that would have the color of those mouldy cornices that harbor wood lice' and that he cared for nothing else, such generally extra-literary preoccupations leave me anything but indifferent. ~ Andre Breton

Classification may very well not be useless, but it is never analysis, no matter how baroquely detailed and comprehensive-seeming its categories. At best, it begs questions. At worst it is presumptuous and totalitarian, replacing understanding with filing. We have all heard papers where categories are the driving force, according to which the way we understand literature (or whatever) is to work out what title fits where, as if literary theory was a giant card-catalog. Even when the last book has been slotted neatly into the last of the holes that were cut to be filled with books, what we have are books in neat piles. Which is not nothing, but neither is it that much. ~ China Mieville

The daughter of the literary biographer Leslie Stephen, and close friend of the innovative biographer of the Victorians, Lytton Strachey, Woolf herself put forward, in 'The New Biography' (1927) (reviewing work by another biographer acquaintance, Harold Nicolson), her own memorable theory of biography, encapsulated in her phrase 'granite and rainbow'. 'Truth' she envisions 'as something of granite-like solidity', and 'personality as
something of rainbow-like intangibility', and 'the aim of biography', she proposes, 'is to weld these two into one seamless whole' (E4 473). The following short biographical account ofWoolf will attempt to keep to the basic granitelike facts that Woolf novices need to know, while also occasionally attending in brief to the more elusive, but equally relevant, matter of rainbow-like personality. ~ Jane Goldman

Well, this is basically the end, so the answers should be in these next few pages. I doubt they will surprise you, but you never know. I don't know how smart or thick you are. You could be Albert Einstein for all I know, or some literary prizewinner, or maybe you're just middle of the road like me. ~ Markus Zusak

Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:



We got dressed and showed the house

You live well the visitor said

The slum must be inside you.



If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry fi ~ C.D. Wright