Literature Quotes

If we take the capsulation of minorities within the nation-state as a given condition, the implication of the Holocaust is that the life and liberties of minorities depend primarily upon whether the dominant group includes them within its universe of obligation; these are the bonds that hold or the bonds that break. ~ Helen Fein

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. ~ Aldous Huxley

Your worst enemy can be your best teacher! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

would a madman have been so wise as this? ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Truth never was indebted to a lie. ~ Edward Young

What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage. ~ Salman Rushdie

On less lucid evenings, every library is a haunted cemetery. ~ S.D. Chrostowska

The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home. Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes. ~ Azar Nafisi

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us. ~ Harold Bloom

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature. ~ Emma Bonino

Spiritual literature can be a great aid to an aspirant, or it can be a terrible hindrance. If it is used to inspire practice, motivate compassion, ad nourish devotion, it serves a very valuable purpose. If scriptural study is used for mere intellectual understanding, for pride of accomplishment, or as a substitute for actual practice, then one is taking in too much mental food, which is sure to result in intellectual indigestion. (152) ~ Prem Prakash

One room is always enough for one person. Two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life. ~ Jeanette Winterson

The 'good old times' - all times when old are good. ~ George Gordon Byron

I gradually became persuaded that the subjects, without intending to, had revealed to me a basic truth about markets that was foreign to the literature of economics. ~ Vernon L. Smith

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders. ~ Chinua Achebe

'Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do. ~ Alexander Pope

According to The Echo Nest, a "music intelligence start-up," your music-based Code Halos can tell much more about you than just what kind of music you like to listen to.14 They can also reveal your tastes in food, movies, and literature as well as your product preferences, political leanings, and even measures of intelligence. ~ Malcolm Frank

Her manner was as though she were talking of a distant foreign literature. There was something lonely, something sad in it, something that rather suggested a beggar who has lost all desire. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end. ~ Clement Greenberg

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul ~ Albert Camus

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen. ~ George Jean Nathan

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

In my first publication I might have claimed that I had come to the conclusion, as a result of serious study of the literature and deep thought, that valuable antibacterial substances were made by moulds and that I set out to investigate the problem. That would have been untrue and I preferred to tell the truth that penicillin started as a chance observation. My only merit is that I did not neglect the observation and that I pursued the subject as a bacteriologist. My publication in 1929 was the starting-point of the work of others who developed penicillin especially in the chemical field. ~ Alexander Fleming

Virtue is reason which has become energy. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible ... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship. ~ Ismail Kadare

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do. ~ Don DeLillo

To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitious and invisible. You're everywhere you look, you're the standard against which everyone else is measured. You're like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a "woman doctor" or they will say they went to see "the doctor." People will tell you they have a "gay colleague" or they'll tell you about a colleague. A white person will be happy to tell you about a "Black friend," but when that same person simply mentions a "friend," everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn't have the word "woman" or "gay" or "minority" in its title is a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses "literature," "history" or "political science."
This invisibility is political. ~ Michael S. Kimmel

Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans. It is lovely to be silly at the right moment. ~ Horace

From nothing comes everything. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Nice try, mister, but being cute won't save you. ~ C.J. Milbrandt

A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate ... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins. ~ Franz Kafka

When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won't intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel. ~ Anton Chekhov

I travel, always arriving in the same place. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further. ~ Franz Kafka

The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate; he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world. ~ Etgar Keret

Conceiv'd out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism -personifying ill unparalleled ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic caste, with its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation) -only one of the "wolfish earls" so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendant and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works -works in some respects greater than anything else ill recorded literature. ~ Walt Whitman

We were always eating expired things. Milk, bread, biscuits, cake. We forgot about them as they sat around the house and just as they had gone bad, we put them in our mouths. Chocolates I brought back with me from Australia, cheeses in last year's Christmas hamper, juice from the last time someone decided to go grocery shopping. We didn't always realize they tasted funny – not everything curdles and a two-month-old orange can be just as sweet. When we did, it was usually too late. Sometimes it wasn't. We finished what we had started anyway. ~ Cheryl Julia Lee

But surely the will to create was a form of the will to live...? ~ Ryunosuke Akutagawa

I was reading everything under the sun from music history to feminist literature to Shakespeare, which is why I'm not a complete idiot at this time. ~ Emilie Autumn

I mean, the idea that Bar could have sent him off on a Grand Tour. But he wasn't the least bit interested. Why? Why isn't he interested in the world? Because here's the bad news for him: He's in the world now. ~ Chris Matthews

There are too many books I haven't read, too many places I haven't seen, too many memories I haven't kept long enough. ~ Irwin Shaw

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

By the time we were knit in our mothers' wombs, our lives were like open books before Him
every sentence read, every paragraph indented, every chapter titled, every page numbered. He knew it all in advance
all the sin, all the selfishness, every weakness. Yet He chose to love us
lavishly. ~ Beth Moore

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.
Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Some poets marry a language; some have affairs with it; some treat it as a parent, some as a child, some as an equal, or as a friend. ~ Stephen Burt

She was a great and insatiable reader, surprisingly well acquainted with the classics of literature, and unexpectedly lavish in the purchase of books. Her neighbours never forgot to mention, in describing her, the awe-inspiring fact that she 'took in the English Times and the Saturday Review, and read every word of them,' but it was hinted that the bookshelves that her own capable hands had put up in her bedroom held a large proportion of works of fiction of a startlingly advanced kind, 'and,' it was generally added in tones of mystery, 'many of them French. ~ Edith Somerville

Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the "wrong crowd" read like tornado alerts in parent manuals ... It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren't planning to get a Ph. D. from Yale. ~ Mary Blakely

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel. ~ Joseph Addison

The word 'NO' is the best motivation there is for the storyteller in you. ~ A.K. Kuykendall

All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers. Aldous Huxley ~ Nicholas Murray

Be able to draw an illustration as least well enough to get your point across to another person. ~ Marilyn Vos Savant

I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories. ~ Kevin J. Anderson

The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature. ~ Alan Bennett

Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes ... He is without doubt the prince of his profession. ~ Virginia Woolf

Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit. ~ Richard Flanagan

Growing up, I loved the tale of Peter Rabbit and also books on Pippi Longstocking. Pippi was a girl who had so much fun and was very daring. My sons loved all the Dr. Seuss books ~ Soraya Diase Coffelt

It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it. ~ Francis Beaumont

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the day.

"Al, for want of anything better to do, is standing nodding his head.

This reminds Faron of those stupid dogs that people put in their cars, that when the car moves, the dogs frantically nod their heads, like some demented, freshly graduated psychologist, with their first patients. ~ Gary Edward Gedall

The excellence of this important contribution to genre literature CANNOT be overstated A masterwork. ~ William F. Nolan

If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play 'The Crucible' analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials. ~ Jane Smiley

Movements in literature were not caricatures - in the sense that they actually functioned as an ideology in politics does. As now a monopolistic ideology in politics prevails in the literature as well a single movement prevails: that of networking as a literary quality. Quality = networking is the magic formula: take a Krijn Peter Hesselink, never managed to score a positive review but reviews are old news: it is only referential authority trickling down from that network pyramid that counts. Thus, nowadays its perfectly possible to be on top of the Pyramid without ever getting a positive review, or - even worse - I even see people rising in literary ranks that have never written any books at all. Ergo, your point that another ideology would make a 'caricature' of literary history is exactly the same reasoning used by neoliberals to deconstruct any political change: another ideology? Impossible, because they no longer exist, only we still exist.

In this way you get a pyramid shape you also see in popular music. It's still the bands from the 70's and 80's who earn the big money. New talent can't really play ball anymore. This of course embedded in a sauce of eternal talent shows, because the incumbent males have to just keep pretending they are everyone's benefactors. In the literature its the same: it is still Pfeijffer that gets the large sums of money from the Foundation of Literature, and it's still Samuel Vriezen pretending that that doesn't matter.

Martijn Benders

There is no room in the economic literature for people making a living through self-employment, finding way to develop goods or services that they sell directly to those who need them. But in the real world, that's what you see the poor doing everywhere. ~ Muhammad Yunus

There are people whom even children's literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon. ~ Anton Chekhov

In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile. It looks beautiful, but soulless. So I warn them that, often in writing programs, articulation and clarity are more important than what you actually say . . . And you say, "It's so well-written, but who gives a fuck?" For certain, the guy who wrote it doesn't give a fuck. It's not something that has to do with his life; it's just something well-written and illuminating, and writing is not about that. The best stories you usually hear are stories that people feel some type of urgency about . . .

Nobody else in the world would look at writing as craftsmanship - it's totally this Protestant hardworking ethic. You go into this kind of infinite space of imagination and you fence yourself in with all kinds of laws. Why do we have to keep playing this strange game? ~ Etgar Keret

While they read these stories, moreover - and this is a comforting thought for those who believe that the best way for anyone to become a lover of real literature is to be exposed to it early and often - boys and girls are not only gratifying their love for a
stirring tale, they are making the acquaintance of the great story-tellers of the past, taking them into their lives as companions. This early contact gives children an experience which will keep their horizon in after life from being entirely circumscribed by the mediocre and ephemeral. If a boy has sailed the wine dark Aegean, or climbed a height whence he could watch Roland's last heroic stand in the Pass of Roncevaux, some gleam remains, and there is far less likelihood that his adult reading will be entirely commonplace. ~ Anne Thaxter Eaton

If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy. ~ Ken Kesey

Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature. ~ Paul Ricoeur

You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced. ~ Graham Greene

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, on the 15th October, 1856, so that he is now about twenty-six years of age, but brief as has been his career, it has been full of promise for the future. The son of highly intellectual parents, he has had an exceptional education, has travelled much in wild and remote, through classic lands, and in the course of these journeys has learnt to appreciate the beauties of the old authors, in whose works whilst at college he attained exceptional proficiency. But his naturally enthusiastic temperament teaches him to hope for better in the future than has been achieved in the past, and to see how vast will be the influence of Art and Literature on the coming democracy of Intellect, when education and culture shall have taught men to pride themselves on what they have done, and not alone on the deeds of their ancestors. ~ Walter Hamilton

Inequality was the price of civilization. ~ George Orwell

At no other time or place in human history have social conflicts been so richly diverse, so vigorously articulated, so eloquently manifest in art and literature or adressed with such directness by the political system and the media. ~ Ramachandra Guha

They are constantly colonists and emigrants ; they have the name of being at home in every country. But they are in exile in their own country. They are torn between love of home and love of
something else; of which the sea may be the explanation or may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme which is the finest line in English literature and the dumb refrain of all English poems, 'Over the hills and far away. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Literature became an arsenal where the poorest and the weakest could always find weapons to their hand. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows. ~ Lucretius

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life. ~ Elie Wiesel

For my part, I have worked all my life with eggs and embryos of frogs. Compared to other small animals, these have figured prominently in the world of literature. ~ John Gurdon

I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours. ~ Teju Cole

When, over lunch in Philadelphia, I ask the distinguished University of Pennsylvania historian, Alan Charles Kors about Cultural Studies, he shakes his head in dismay. "Cultural Studies," he laments, "is now dominant in all departments of literature and is increasingly big in history, sociology, and cultural anthropology, though less so in political science." His own capsule definition of Cultural Studies? "It sees culture as a means of assigning roles, power, obedience, and resources - and examines the way in which culture accomplishes that. ~ Bruce Bawer

That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making. ~ Walter De La Mare

Oh my research. Well, I got an English Degree. And I got that degree in a certain time/at a certain place. If you add UC Berkeley + 1984 the other side of the = is "new historian" meaning that I studied with and was influenced by those who were interested in how the personal shaped the political (and literary), how science and literature might interact, and what the body got to do with it. ~ Laura Mullen

Classics is a subject that exists in that gap between us and the word of the Greeks and Romans. The questions raised by Classics are the questions raised by our distance from 'their' world, and at the same time by our closeness to it, and its familiarity to us. In our museums, in our literature, languages, culture, and ways of thinking. The aim of Classics is not only to discover or uncover the ancient world (though that is part of it, as the rediscovery of Bassae, or the excavation of the furthest outposts of the Roman empire on the Scottish borders, shows). Its aim is to also define and debate our relationship to that world. ~ Mary Beard

It is always understood as an expression of condemnation when anything in Literature or Art is said to be done for effect; and yet to produce an effect is the aim and end of both. ~ George Henry Lewes

Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same bolt of cloth and in the church pew standing six across they looked like a strip of gaudy wallpaper cut into those linked dolls madfolk pass their time in fashioning. ~ Cormac McCarthy

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone. ~ Henry David Thoreau

To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachable of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art. ~ Walt Whitman

The autonomous individual, striving to realize himself and prove his worth, has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science and technology. The autonomous individual, also, when he can neither realize himself nor justify his existence by his own efforts, is a breeding call of frustration, and the seed of the convulsions which shake our world to its foundations. ~ Eric Hoffer

Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self-delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving. ~ Mary Karr

Voluptuous?"
Grey smiled at the naughty light in her gaze. "A full subscription. Perhaps you will discover between the pages other activities you would like to sample with me."
It wasn't much of a gift, certainly not an expensive one, but Rose embraced him as though he had given her the world-and he had the wine stains on his cuffs to prove it. "Thank you!" She kissed his cheek. "Oh, Grey, thank you so much!"
"It's only a magazine, Rose, but you are welcome."
She pulled back so that he could see her face, the delighted flush in her cheeks. "It's not just a magazine. It's a gesture of…trust and respect. Do you know how many husbands would forbid their wives to read such literature?"
Yes, he did, and he would hardly call it literature. "I'm of the opinion that a husband can only benefit from his wife reading this kind of material."
A coy, seductive-wonderfully wicked-smile curved her full lips. "Perhaps we will both benefit."
He could shag her senseless right then and there. He gave her back her wine instead, and positioned himself with his back against the headboard. He tugged her close, turning her so that she sat with her back against his chest. "Read to me."
She looked horrified at the idea. "What? No, I couldn't."
Grey trailed his fingers down the side of her neck, smiling smugly as she shivered. "Read it. Please."
Her fingers trembled slightly as they parted the pages. "What would you like to hear?"
"A story," he repl ~ Kathryn Smith

All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

I always find that after reading books written by Jane Austen that I speak much more properly, at least for a while. ~ Becky Watson

The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered. ~ Pat Conroy

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city. ~ Italo Calvino

It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel. ~ John Keats

It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words. ~ Eric Hoffer