On Literature Quotes

Natural science, economics, and politics depend on literature, philosophy, and religion for educating the imagination... we cannot oppose facts to values, but... all facts are integrated into meaningful wholes through a personal commitment to some kind of vision of how things ought to be. If this universal hermeneutic claim is true, then the shaping of our imagination through historical, philosophical, and literary texts in the humanities is indeed paramount. ~ Jens Zimmermann

A final caution to students: in making judgments on literature, always be honest. Do not pretend to like what you really do not like. Do not be afraid to admit a liking for what you do like. A genuine enthusiasm for the second-rate is much better than false enthusiasm or no enthusiasm at all. Be neither hasty nor timorous in making your judgments. When you have attentively read a poem and thoroughly considered it, decide what you think. Do not hedge, equivocate, or try to find out others' opinions before forming your own. But having formed an opinion and expressed it, do not allow it to petrify. Compare your opinion then with the opinions of others; allow yourself to change it when convinced of its error: in this way you learn. Honestly, courage, and humility are the necessary moral foundations for all genuine literary judgment. ~ Laurence Perrine

I have friends who are writers, but we don't tend to talk about literature very much. It's just not part of my process; I tend to be pretty secretive about what I'm working on. ~ Donald Miller

Langdon, I did not ask if you believe what man says about God. I asked if you believed in God. There is a difference. Holy scripture is stories . . . legends and history of man's quest to understand his own need for meaning. I am not asking you to pass judgment on literature. I am asking if you believe in God. ~ Dan Brown

I was so enthused with literature -- not stuck on literature, but in love with letters -- that I was easily inclined to bring all the conversations round to works I had read or fictitious characters from my readings about whom I loved to talk ~ Joseph Zobel

If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story? ~ T.C. Boyle

The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview. ~ V.S. Pritchett

Mr. Langdon, I did not ask if you believe what man says about God. I asked if you believed in God. There is a difference. Holy scripture is stories ... legends and history of man's quest to understand his own need for meaning. I am not asking you to pass judgment on literature. I am asking if you believe in God. When you lie out under the stars, do you sense the divine? Do you feel in your gut that you are staring up at the work of God's hands? ~ Dan Brown

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

Theory sometimes seems to me a way of taking revenge on literature - the critic masters the text and rewrites it in his own image, instead of submitting to it and listening to what it has to say. The aggressive ungainliness of so much academic writing about literature is a sign of this - it is unliterary writing about literature, which should be a contradiction in terms. ~ Adam Kirsch

I probably have a 20,000-word vocabulary. I'll match my wits with anyone on literature, science and the arts. ~ Mike Tyson

The more you learn,the more you want to learn. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.
The value judgement concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction.
Every readable novel can give true pleasure. Every novel read by choice is read because it gives true pleasure.
Literature consists of many genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, western, army life, young adult, thriller, etc., etc…. and the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as erotic Regency, noir police procedural, or historical thriller with zombies.
Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral.
Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior.

(Hypothesis on Literature vs. Genre) ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature. ~ Naguib Mahfouz

with you, the sense i have lost my place in a book
or simply lost - misplaced the memory
which isn't in the last place where I looked.
a thought that the clouds don't move - that it is we
who thunder past - there it is! an old vacation,
a train ride - sense of immobility.
as sky and forest scroll past in relation,
we are not moved, pretend to love the view,
resort at length to scripted conversation
by a poet-turned-screenwriter who
didn't want this job, career gone grossly wrong
and now drafts action film scripts wholly two-
dimensional unless you choose to don
the 3d glasses that do not stay on - ~ Joshua Ip

I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably. Please don't think that my reaction is the result of intolerance towards my neighbor: the worst discomfort of all comes from hearing myself speak. That's why I try to talk as little as possible. If I prefer writing, it is because I can revise each sentence until I reach the point where - if not exactly satisfied with my words - I am able at least to eliminate those reasons for dissatisfaction that I can put a finger on. Literature - and I mean the literature that matches up to those requirements - is the promised land in which language becomes what it really ought to be. ~ Italo Calvino

this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings....the merry dance of death and trade goes on ~ Joseph Conrad

Like a blazing comet, I've traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear. I've been a man, a woman, an old person, a little girl, I've been the crowds on the grand boulevards of the capital cities of the West, I've been the serene Buddha of the East, whose calm and wisdom we envy. I've known honor and dishonor, enthusiasm and exhaustion.
... I've been the sun and the moon, and everything because life is not enough. ~ Antonio Tabucchi

The fire in the evening was the best of all. Peter said is wasn't fie, but he couldn't tell me what it really was. You can thought, Grandfather, can't you?'
'It's the sun's way of saying goodnight to the mountains' he explained. 'He spreads that beautiful light over them so that they won't forget him till he comes back in the morning. ~ Joanna Spyri

Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read. ~ Melissa Bank

I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature that they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times. ~ Bill Styron

. . . what I told Malory happened next is that when he looked over at her then it was like he'd been waiting a hundred years to see her, and this crazy ass Ledfeather girl all the way from Standing Rock, she looked off after the elk and then back at Doby through her hair, like she'd maybe been waiting for him too, but was scared a little, wanted to be sure, so Doby opened his mouth and said her name across the backseat of Junior's cab, Claire, like a flower opening in his mouth, and she held her lips together and nodded thank you to him, yes, thank you, and then swallowed what was in her throat and just let the sides of their hands touch together again some like it didn't really matter.
But it did. ~ Stephen Graham Jones

To leave out beautiful sunsets is the secret of good taste. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

every fictional world was a work of fantasy, and whenever writers introduce a threat or a conflict into their story, they create the possibility of horror. He had been drawn to horror fiction, he said, because it took the most basic elements of literature and pushed them to their extremes. All fiction was make-believe, which made fantasy more valid (and honest) than realism. He ~ Joe Hill

It came to my mind that in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, in Indian spiritual literature, and in the Bhagavad Gita, and when I started reading about outstanding yogis and people of exceeding spiritual power such as Ramana Maharshi, or Yogananda, they all had the ability to do what we would call - I don't know what you would even call it - psychic phenomenon, magic, transform objects, be able to perceive the future, the past and the present simultaneously. ~ Fred Alan Wolf

Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it's better to do both. ~ Marjane Satrapi

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. ~ Susan Sontag

We live at the edge of the miraculous. ~ Henry Miller

Dogma, static positions, consonance - all these are obstacles to catching the disease of art, at least in its more complex forms. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures. ~ Michael Novak

Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them. ~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

Harold: "It so happens I was discussing great works of literature with Toby."
Chester: "Since when is a Twinkies wrapper considered a great work of literature? ~ James Howe

Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature. ~ Eleanor Catton

A little while ago I was able to wander in a beautiful sublime fantasy world, in Ossian's half-dark magical world. But the blessed dreams dissolve; they seem like love potions - they intoxicate, exalt and then disappear, that is the misery and wretchedness of all our feelings. With thoughts it is no better: one easily overthinks things to the point of staleness. ~ Karoline Von Günderrode

The great thing about literature is that it's subjective. No two readers read the same book, because we all see the words through different eyes, filter the story through different life experiences. ~ Lisa Wingate

Bookstores, invariably, are a refuge. There's one in the town where they live, and the first time Lydia ventures in, it takes her breath away. She has to steady herself against a shelf. The smell of coffee and paper and ink. It's nothing like her little shop back home. It's stocked mostly with religious books, and instead of calendars and toys, they carry rosaries, Buddha figurines, yarmulkes. Still, the upright spines of the books are bedrock. Steady. There's an international poetry section. Hafiz. Heaney. Neruda. Lydia flips past the twenty love poems and reads "The Song of Despair." She reads it desperately, hungrily, bent over the books in the aisle of the quiet shop. Her fingers ready the next page while she devours the words. The book is water in the desert. ~ Jeanine Cummins

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. ~ Juan Ramon Jimenez

You will come across people who always affirm by everything you say, but at the hour of need, they simply disappear! Stay away from such people or simply don't fall for their promises. ~ K. Hari Kumar

Teaching English literature would have seemed to us like teaching a hungry man the way to his mouth when he had a feast before him. Almost ~ Albert Jay Nock

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement. ~ William Stafford

I know you think I've behaved like a cad, so I'm coming clean. I love you, Tess. I have for a long time. I ache for you. Every morning I wake up, wishing you were in my arms. Back when Cassie was at her mom's, I was relieved to be thinking about you and not her so much anymore, until I realized it meant that I was in love with you. I fell for you that first morning, when I saw you coming out of the garage with Dave. I couldn't tell you the other day, but I wanted you to know." He leaned in and kissed her cheek. "Maybe I have been protecting myself, but mostly, I wanted to protect you. ~ Lilly Christine

I'm planting a tree to teach me to make the world a better place. ~ Andrea Koehle Jones

We build this country ourselves every day and we have to be, in the most positive sense, totally unreal. ~ J.C. Villamere

I was a big reader as a child. My father is a great book lover and a librarian, but he forbid me to read bad literature. I was not allowed to read Nancy Drew or books like that. I often say to him that me becoming a crime author is both a way of pleasing him and annoying him. ~ Asa Larsson

Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts. ~ Yahoo Serious

Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries
slave of prejudice ... slave of religious fanaticism ... slave of barbarity and inhumanity. ~ Saadat Hasan Manto

Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature ... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe. ~ Edwin Muir

The boys learn the Quran by heart, rocking back and forth as they recite. They learn that there is no such thing as science or literature, that dinosaurs never existed and man never went to the moon. ~ Malala Yousafzai

You get my idea. Nothing of "artistic" literature about it, just straight medicine, a universal panacea, a fetish in a sense: if you have a toothache go to your dentist and ask him if he is Dada. ~ Marcel Duchamp

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. ~ Marcel Proust

I know surely you're thinking of me, for
I am strange, and you're kind to the stranger ~ Zubair Ahsan

Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Even in an advanced stage of civilization, there is always a tendency to prefer those parts of literature which favor ancient prejudices, rather than those which oppose them; and in cases where this tendency is very strong, the only effect of great learning will be to supply the materials which may corroborate old errors and confirm old superstitions. In our time such instances are not uncommon; and we frequently meet with men whose erudition ministers to their ignorance, and who, the more they read the less they know. ~ Henry Thomas Buckle

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep. ~ Charles Baudelaire

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts. ~ Ezra Pound

I can only bow to the will of the heaven, but not to the will of these men. ~ Eiji Yoshikawa

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog. ~ Friedrich Von Schlegel

Writers, that deep dark secret is not something you should hide from the world. It is your gift. Take it from memory and illuminate it in literature,shake the dust from it, unless it will get you arrested, lol. ~ Kevin R. Hill

When millions applaud you seriously ask yourself what harm you have done; and when they disapprove you, what good. ~ Charles Caleb Colton