Literature Classics Quotes

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

Classics aren't books that are read for pleasure. Classics are books that are imposed on unwilling students, books that are subjected to analyses of "levels of significance" and other blatt, books that are dead. ~ Alexei Panshin

I see that my presence is burdensome to you. Painful as it was for me to become convinced of it, I see that it is so and cannot be otherwise. I do not blame you, and God is my witness that, seeing you during your illness, I resolved with all my soul to forget everything that had been between us and start a new life. I do not repent and will never repent of what I have done; but I desired one thing - your good, the good of your soul - and now I see that I have not achieved it. Tell me yourself what will give you true happiness and peace in your soul. I give myself over entirely to your will and your sense of justice. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I said, "Don't do nothing of the kind; it's one of the most jackass ideas I ever struck; ~ Mark Twain

It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come. -Winnie-the-Pooh ~ A.A. Milne

I've illuminated the blackness of my invisibility - and vice versa. ~ Ralph Ellison

So does a whole world, with all of its greatness and littleness, lie in a twinkling star. ~ Charles Dickens

Countless words
count less
than the silent balance
between yin and yang ~ Lao-Tzu

For me, baseball is the most nourishing game outside of literature. They both are re-tellings of human experience. ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce, then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty. But the progressive Westerner is determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light - his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow. ~ Junichiro Tanizaki

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Well, there's just some universal truths in a way that I've just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go, there's these observations about romantic love and what it does people, and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other. ~ Feist

A major premise of my fictional novel Noah Primeval is that the gods of the ancient world were real spiritual beings with supernatural powers. Thus, the mythical literature and artistic engravings of the gods that have been uncovered by Mesopotamian archeology reflect a certain amount of factual reality. The twist is that these gods are actually fallen divine angelic beings called "Sons of God" (Bene Elohim) in the Bible. ~ Brian Godawa

Many cultural stories worldwide present the domination system as the only human alternative. Fairy tales romanticize the rule of kings and queens over "common people." Classics such as Homers Illiad and Shakespeare's kings trilogy romanticize "Heroic violence." Many religious stories present men's control, even ownership, of women as normal and moral.

These stories came out of the times that oriented much more closely to a "pure" domination system. Along with newer stories that perpetuate these limited beliefs about human nature, they play a major role in how we view our world and how we live in it. But precisely because stories are so important in shaping values, new narratives can help change unhealthy values.

Of particular importance are new stories about human nature. We need new narratives that give us a more complete and accurate picture of who we are and who we can be - stories that show that our enormous capacities for consciousness, creativity and caring are integral to human evolution, that these capacities are what make us distinctively human. ~ Riane Eisler

There's a saying," Aeneas said: "Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts." He spoke wryly. "Horses, particularly. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Marriage cannot be a job as it has become. ~ Germaine Greer

We have already shown by references to the contemporary drama that the plea of custom is not sufficient to explain Shakespeare's attitude to the lower classes, but if we widen our survey to the entire field of English letters in his day, we shall see that he was running counter to all the best traditions of our literature. From the time of Piers Plowman down, the peasant had stood high with the great writers of poetry and prose alike. Chaucer's famous circle of story-tellers at the Tabard Inn in Southwark was eminently democratic. ~ William Shakespeare

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries. ~ H.G.Wells

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person. ~ Anais Nin

That is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned! ~ Margaret Mitchell

Housework, if you do it right, will kill you. - Erma Bombeck ~ Lynn Kellan

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

In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape from blame ... ~ Matthew Gregory Lewis

I love New Orleans physically. I love the trees and the balmy air and the beautiful days. I have a beautiful house here. ~ Anne Rice

He suddenly saw the enterprise of literature as essentially mad. ~ Mark Beauregard

I don't have a problem with many uses of the word genre, just certain ones. I have the most trouble when these labels are used to prevent discussion, to prevent a work from being taken seriously as literature. When we say "genre," we generally mean "something crappy," something that would be sold in an airport. ~ Michael Chabon

To be really realistic a description would
have to be endless. Where Stendhal describes in one phrase Lucien Leuwen's entrance into a room, the
realistic artist ought, logically, to fill several volumes with descriptions of characters and settings, still
without succeeding in exhausting every detail. Realism is indefinite enumeration. By this it reveals that its
real ambition is conquest, not of the unity, but of the totality of the real world. Now we understand why it
should be the official aesthetic of a totalitarian revolution. But the impossibility of such an aesthetic has
already been demonstrated. Realistic novels select their material, despite themselves, from reality,
because the choice and the conquest of reality are absolute conditions of thought and expression. To
write is already to choose. There is thus an arbitrary aspect to reality, just as there is an arbitrary aspect to
the ideal, which makes a realistic novel an implicit problem novel. To reduce the unity of the world of
fiction to the totality of reality can only be done by means of an a priori judgment which eliminates form,
reality, and everything that conflicts with doctrine. Therefore so-called socialist realism is condemned by
the very logic of its nihilism to accumulate the advantages of the edifying novel and propaganda
literature. ~ Albert Camus

She took a deep breath, "Last chance. Are you in need of rescuing?"
His expression turned very strange, almost as if she'd struck him, "Yes," he said finally. ~ Holly Black

... And the sound of the sea, like the wild-animal breath of the world itself, frightened them as it gasped and died at their feet. ~ Leonardo Sciascia

Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure. ~ Thomas Edward Brown

Such an act [testifying for an accused prison guard of the Shah's regime] can only be accomplished by someone who is engrossed in literature, has learned that every individual has different dimensions to his personality ... Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them ... If we have learned this one lesson from Dr. A our society would have been in a much better shape today. ~ Azar Nafisi

With red clay between my toes,
and the sun setting over my head,
the ghost of my mother blows in,
riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord,
riding on a honeysuckle breeze. ~ Brenda Sutton Rose

I looked into the literature on this," said Nightingale, "and it wasn't very helpful."
"There's a literature about this?"
"You'd be amazed, Constable, about what there's a literature on. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. ~ Herman Melville

The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much more easily into the fields of painting, literature, and the theater. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

In the lie of truth lies the truth. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I think I'm very real as a person, and that comes across in my work. ~ Danielle Steel

Later that night though, as I stayed awake into the early hours of morning devouring the second novel in a series, I understood what it meant to befriend a book. The books knew me, far better than I knew them; they knew my fears, my doubts, my dreams. They gave words to feelings I did not even realize I experienced. They listened. They consoled. They kept me company. The books gave me a life outside of my own. ~ Kelseyleigh Reber

The feeling, all encompassing, safe and warm like a blanket permanently draped over her shoulders, follows her around. She takes it into the shower, to meals with her mother and sister, to work as she reads out the news script, her voice never faltering. ~ Zainab Omaki

I didn't want to be a catcher. It was thrust upon me, as they say in the classics. ~ Mickey Cochrane

I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel ... I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself. ~ Anatole Broyard

What an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature ... (I mean the literature of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something "out there" which cannot be brought "here". This is standard. I don't mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a "successful artist" (except, of course, in worldly terms). ~ Donald Barthelme

I remember when I left Hungary," Zoltan said, "understanding so completely that literature could save me as much as it could get me killed. Of course it's not like that here. But isn't it funny, that in some ways the price one pays for freedom of speech is ... a kind of indifference. ~ Daphne Kalotay

the whole point of literature, I think, is that it's the best technology we have for communicating what another person's life feels like from the inside. ~ Garth Greenwell

My hapless peers with their lofty dreams
how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Whoever controls the media, the
images, controls the culture. ~ Allen Ginsberg

A movie is painting, it's photography, it's literature - because you have to have the screenplay - it's music. Put a different soundtrack to a comedy and it's a tragedy. A movie combines all those forms and forces you to pay attention for two hours with a group of people. ~ Paula Patton

My decision to start a new one is just that, a decision, since I never get inspirations. ~ Anne Tyler