Transgressive Literature Quotes

A woman can be an object if that's her objective. ~ Brandon Tietz

That's the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public. We used to go to church to confess our worst behaviour, to be heard and forgiven, then to be redeemed and accepted back into our community
Chuck Palahniuk in interview with TMO ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I [...] squarely and enthusiastically recommend ['Hey Boy' by A.W.W. Bremont][...]. [...][T]he start of a no doubt stellar oeuvre to come. ~ Dennis Cooper

A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love. ~ Doris Lessing

The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature. ~ Deborah Harkness

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death. ~ D.H. Lawrence

In 1935, Faber & Faber published an anthology entitled 'My Best Western Story' in which the genre's leading practitioners contributed what they considered their finest. Alas, literature the stories ain't; they appear more like fossils from a spent mine. ~ Clive Sinclair

Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built by Shakespeare and those others. ~ Mark Twain

When people ask me to define science fiction and fantasy I say they are the literatures that explore the fact that we are toolmakers and users, and are always changing our environment. ~ Nalo Hopkinson

A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people. ~ Frederick Douglass

All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand. ~ George Henry Lewes

Unity is the most important thing on the road to stamping out terror. You need global rules of law and order, and they have to be enforced. Start with that principle. ~ Chris Matthews

In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid. ~ Dave Barry

But they who give straight judgements to strangers and to those of the land and do not transgress what is just, for them the city flourishes and its people prosper. ~ Hesiod

Literature is the only art in which the audience performs the score. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

In the garden of literature, the highest and the most charismatic flowers are always the quotations. ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

But the older he grew and the more intimately he came to know his brother, the oftener the thought occurred to him that the power of working for the general welfare – a power of which he felt himself entirely destitute – was not a virtue but rather a lack of something: not a lack of kindly honesty and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of the power of living, of what is called heart – the aspiration which makes a man choose one out of all the innumerable paths of life that present themselves, and desire that alone. ~ Leo Tolstoy

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Walking on water is easy if you know where to step. ~ Peter Tieryas

Mom calls me Patch-a-roo and Patch-a-roo-ny. She usually croons these names to me or crows them as if she's imitating the rooster. I know this is a little odd, but I'm a really special dog. Of course, sometimes she calls me Stink-a-roo. ~ Lea Beall

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

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it. ~ Miguel De Cervantes

And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? 'Confound it all.' he cried, 'why say Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and save it? ~ Virginia Woolf

Nothing is more witty and grotesque than ancient mythology and Christianity; that is because they are so mystical. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

There is a broad cultural current that conveys the idea that a film is like a football team, it represents a nation, it is illustrated literature, filmed radio. These are outdated concepts, totally out of touch with today's realities. ~ Jean-Jacques Annaud

George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. "Don't worry", Stigler said, "they have already have a Nobel Prize in ... Literature" ~ Robert Kuttner

If the future depends on stories, then our future looks bright indeed. ~ Pawan Mishra

We are wanderers, place shifters, the cosmic homeless. This is not a modern truth, and Achilles is not some new kind of existentialist hero. It is the oldest truth of all, surviving uncomfortably into the modern world of cities and overkings, diplomacy and accommodation, the power structures and the proliferation of stuff which the Mediterranean world provides. ~ Adam Nicolson

Suicide. This is the exact opposite of last time, for this time I'm experiencing a kind of pleasure in life, in being alive, a pleasure in living that I've never experienced before, and I'm hopeful and confident that I can become someone with dignity. I know now why I couldn't change certain characteristics and certain things about myself, but it's not a problem anymore. Certain pathways I failed to open in the past have now opened. My whole self is radiating light. I see with clarity. I understand the cause and effect of the last year. What I had imagined I've now attained. It's as if I can see my life right in front of my eyes, and all I have to do is reach out and draw it in... Now I don't feel the acute pain I felt before; I feel enlightened, at peace. It's as if I've instantly found the secret of "Suffering", how to bear it and how to endure it... Yes, this time I've decided to kill myself not because I can't live with suffering and not because I don't enjoy being alive. I love life passionately, and my wish to die is a wish to live...

Yes, I've chosen suicide. The endpoint of this process of "Forgiveness". Not to punish anyone or to protest a wrong. I've chosen suicide with a clarity I've never possessed before, with a rational resolve and sense of calm, in order to pursue the ultimate meaning of my life, act on my belief about the beauty between two people... I take complete responsibility for my life, and even if my physical body disappears upon death, I do ~ Qiu Miaojin

And Marx spoke of the fact that socialism will be the kingdom of freedom, where man realizes himself in a way that humankind has never seen before. This was an inspiring body of literature to read. ~ Albert Maltz

What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another-- here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it.

Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live. ~ Ernst F. Schumacher

Nothing is made, nothing disappears. The same changes, at the same places, never stopping. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature. ~ Tayari Jones

Job is perhaps the oldest piece of literature known to man. How did Job know the Earth is suspended in space? Job could only know through divine inspiration. ~ Adrian Rogers

A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one. ~ C.S. Lewis

If you look closely, there is no book more visual than Three Trapped Tigers, in that it is filled with blank pages, dark pages, it has stars made of words, the famous magical cube made of numbers, and there is even a page which is a mirror. ~ Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature? ~ Rex Stout

I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward. ~ Paul Kalanithi

In the psychological literature, depression is often seen as a defense against sadness. But I'll take sadness any day. There is no contest. Sadness carries identification. You know where it's been and you know where it's headed. Depression carries no papers. It enters your country unannounced and uninvited. Its origins are unknown, but its destination always dead-ends in you. ~ Martha Manning

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them. ~ Henry David Thoreau

To leap over the wall of self, to look through another's eyes--this is valuable experience, which literature offers. ~ X.J. Kennedy

I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That's how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey. ~ Feisal Abdul Rauf

To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Conflict is the soul of literature. ~ Erica Jong

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

Within the magic of the asking,
lives the magic to receive,
wonderfully exciting, endless possibilities! ~ Amma Sharon