Portuguese Literature Quotes

I am a keeper of flocks.
The flocks are my thoughts
and all my thoughts are sensations.
I think with my eyes and my ears,
with my hands and with my feet
and with my nose and my mouth.
For to consider a flower is to both see it and smell it
and to eat of fruit is to understand its meaning.

So when the sun is at its brightest
and I feel guilty for embracing it,
I stretch out, supine, on the grassy earth,
and close my sun drenched eyes.
I view my entire body lying firmly on reality,
I know the truth, and am content. ~ Alberto Caeiro

Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Short things are short all over and long things are long all over. ~ Jim Harrison

All dust is the same dust.
Temporarily separated
To go peacefully
And enjoy the eternal nap. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man. ~ Norman MacCaig

She comes to naught, my dear one, she comes to naught, all that there business. What the hell, maybe twice in your life you have yourself a whore of a good time, and then you spend every night of the rest of your life trying to get that good time back. But she comes to naught. ~ Lynn Coady

He knows he will be born again,
And start fresh anew. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Young earth creationists try to force modern science into a literal reading of Genesis 1. Day-age theorists try to fit Genesis 1 into modern science. Proponents of the restoration view try to have their cake and eat it too by inserting a speculative gap between verses 1 and 2 of this chapter. All three views are fundamentally misguided and are rooted in contradictory opinions about the meaning and significance of various words and phrases in Genesis 1 (e.g., "day," "formless void"). None of them have seriously considered the more fundamental question concerning the kind of literature we are dealing with in Genesis 1. More ~ Gregory A. Boyd

I'm writing a new love story, set in eastern North Carolina. Surprise, surprise, huh? ~ Nicholas Sparks

Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age. ~ Jonathan Swift

Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe. ~ A. B. Yehoshua

The Gospels were not thought of as works of literature. People were not concerned with the literary reputation of Matthew or Mark, but with the substance of their records of our Lord's life. They did not have to respect their actual words, as they would if they were transcribing the works of Thucydides or Plato. ~ Frederic G. Kenyon

Dear Mama: The reason I didn't write last Sunday was because I was out of town. My friend Pound invited me to spend Saturday and Sunday with him … His parents are very nice people and have always been exceptionally kind to me. Mrs. Pound had prepared a fine meal … After supper Pound and I went to his room where we had a long talk on subjects that I love yet have not time to study and which he is making a life work of. That is literature, and the drama and the classics, also a little philosophy. He, Pound, is a fine fellow; he is the essence of optimism and has a cast-iron faith that is something to admire. If he ever does get blue nobody knows it, so he is just the man for me. But not one person in a thousand likes him, and a great many people detest him and why? Because he is so darned full of conceits and affectation. He is really a brilliant talker and thinker but delights in making himself just exactly what he is not: a laughing boor. His friends must be all patience in order to find him out and even then you must not let him know it, for he will immediately put on some artificial mood and be really unbearable. It is too bad, for he loves to be liked, yet there is some quality in him which makes him too proud to try to please people. I am sure his only fault is an exaggeration of a trait that in itself is good and in every way admirable. He is afraid of being taken in if he trusts his really tender heart to mercies of a cruel crowd and so keeps it hidden and trusts no one ~ William Carlos Williams

Sneakiness was a form of privacy and privacy here was the first loss. ~ Joan London

A community united by the ideals of compassion and creativity has incredible power. Art of all kinds
music, literature, traditional arts, visual arts
can lift a community. ~ Martin O'Malley

Addiction is a very compelling subject for literature - especially now that it's nearly impossible to come out of adult experience without some addiction - to substances, sure, but also to love, sex, success, failure, power. ~ Porochista Khakpour

Some of the very heroic and colourful figures in our history are sons of Sabaragamuwa - Parakramabahu I, born in Dedigama, the warrior King Rajasinghe I also known as Sitawaka Rajasingha, Edirille Rala born in Colombo and baptised Domingo Corea, who returned to the village of his ancestors Atulugama near Sitawaka and turned against the Portuguese. ~ Dominicus Corea

If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring. ~ Georges Bataille

I'm not convinced that what are traditionally considered to be male energies or qualities or female energies or qualities really have as much to do with gender as many people think they do. ~ Andrew Cohen

With a slow wink, he set the book in Tamaqua's hands. "One of my favorites. ~ C.J. Milbrandt

I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals … Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond mines to the floors of today's stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease. If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea. ~ W.G. Sebald

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same. ~ Michael Haneke

If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to. ~ Norman Ralph Augustine

Authors as diverse as Matthew Arnold and George Orwell have given thought to the serious question: what is to be done about morals and ethics now that religion has so much decayed? Arnold went almost as far as to propose that the study of literature replace the study of religion. I must say that I slightly dread the effect that this might have had on literary pursuit, but as a source of ethical reflection and as a mirror in which to see our human dilemmas reflected, the literary tradition is infinitely superior to the childish parables and morality tales, let alone the sanguinary and sectarian admonitions, of the "holy" books. ~ Christopher Hitchens

To achieve great success in literature you must have a certain coarseness in your composition... Really to move and influence men you must have complete understanding, and you can only get that if you have in you something of the common clay of humanity. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

No matter how strong you are, you cannot hold open the jaws of a great-white shark with your bare hands ... that can do your brain. ~ Ivan Stoikov

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The truth is artistically fallacious. ~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth. ~ Adam Johnson

Unusual doors often take you to the unusual worlds! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary ~ Salman Rushdie

Buying, borrowing, or stealing the book is the easy part. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES has done such justice to New Orleans. If Franz Kafka had been able to write like Peter Straub, this might have been the result. ~ Donald Harington

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself. ~ Naguib Mahfouz

Literature is what words evoke in the reader. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.

(Southey's reply to Charlotte Bronte) ~ Robert Southey

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling. ~ John Steinbeck

When the long bygone Lee Po wanted to say something, he could do it with only a few words. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Art is made by those who consider themselves to have failed at whatever isn't art. And of course it is loved as consolation, or a call to arms, by those who feel the same. One of the reasons there seem to be fewer readers for literature today than there were yesterday is that the concept of failure has been outlawed. If we are all beautiful, all clever, all happy, all successes in our way, what do we want with the language of the dispossessed? But the nature of failure ensures that writers will go on writing no matter how many readers they have. You have to master the embarrassments and ignominies of life. ~ Howard Jacobson