Truths In Literature Quotes

Because if you're tangled up in someone else, if your futures are tied that way, if that's real and if you know when it happens - then it means you know who you belong to, and you know whose fates are tied to yours, whether you like it or planned it or not, whether they still exist in the same world with you or they don't, and I think that's where everything begins and ends. I think that's everything. ~ Kelly Loy Gilbert

Well documented, the relationship of literature to myth in the Western world has undergone much change over the millennia, as first the age of gods fell away before the notion of a single god, and then, for many people, that single god slipped away, too. ~ Kate Bernheimer

While in some countries there's a feeling that literature must stay away from religion, this is not so in India - in the Indian way, literature is just another means to find a more spiritual life, to find our way to God. ~ Amish Tripathi

Some truths are expressed best in the form of myth. ~ Ransom Riggs

Defining moment in new telepathist's life, moment when intuitive individual learns most of society isn't telepathic, doesn't see auras,doesn't know what life on ethereal astral plane is like. ~ Christina Westover

অদ্ভুত আঁধার এক এসেছে এ-পৃথিবীতে আজ,
যারা অন্ধ সবচেয়ে বেশি আজ চোখে দেখে তারা;
যাদের হৃদয়ে কোনো প্রেম নেই - প্রীতি নেই - করুণার আলোড়ন নেই
পৃথিবী অচল আজ তাদের সুপরামর্শ ছাড়া।
যাদের গভীর আস্থা আছে আজো মানুষের প্রতি
এখনো যাদের কাছে স্বাভাবিক ব'লে মনে হয়
মহৎ সত্য বা রীতি, কিংবা শিল্প অথবা সাধনা
শকুন ও শেয়ালের খাদ্য আজ তাদের হৃদয়।

A strange darkness has come upon the world today.
They who are most blind now see,
Those whose hearts lack love, lack warmth, lack pity's stirrings,
Without their fine advice, the world today dare not make a move.
They who yet possess an abiding faith in man,
To whom still now high truths or age-old customs,
Or industry or austere effort all seem natural,
Their hearts are victuals for the vulture and the jackal.

Translated by: Clinton B. Seely ~ Jibanananda Das

Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Regarding children's literature, look for interesting content and well-constructed sentences clothed in literary language. The imagination should be warmed and the book should hold the interest of the child. Life's too short to spend time with books that bore us. ~ Deborah Taylor-Hough

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas! ~ D.H. Lawrence

Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie. ~ John Ruskin

Religion, if in heavenly truths attired, Needs only to be seen to be admired. ~ William Cowper

Well do I remember a friend of mine telling me once--he was then a labourer in the field of literature, who had not yet begun to earn his penny a day, though he worked hard--telling me how once, when a hope that had kept him active for months was suddenly quenched--a book refused on which he had spent a passion of labour--the weight of money that must be paid and could not be had, pressing him down like the coffin-lid that had lately covered the ONLY friend to whom he could have applied confidently for aid--telling me, I say, how he stood at the corner of a London street, with the rain, dripping black from the brim of his hat, the dreariest of atmospheres about him in the closing afternoon of the City, when the rich men were going home, and the poor men who worked for them were longing to follow; and how across this waste came energy and hope into his bosom, swelling thenceforth with courage to fight, and yield no ear to suggested failure. And ~ George MacDonald

Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword. ~ Walter Kirn

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. ~ Italo Calvino

It strikes me as somewhat odd that the people who use God's name most frequently, both in life and in literature, usually don't believe in him. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness ... it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
from her essay, On Being Ill ~ Virginia Woolf

He was conscious - and the thought brought a gleam of pleasure into his brown agate eyes - that it was through certain words of his, musical words said with musical utterance, that Dorian Gray's soul had turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her. To a large extent the lad was his own creation. He had made him premature. That was something. Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. But now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting. ~ Oscar Wilde

If you can grasp those two truths - you are made in His image and dependent on Him - you will discover a great dignity and at the same time a profound humility. ~ Colin S. Smith

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

What does literature do for me? I think I solve problems in my writing. They may be my problems, but perhaps others share them, and in the process of working these through, I hope to entertain. ~ Sabina Murray

I suppose I could let bygones be bygones, forgive and forget, yadda yadda. But where's the fun in that? These pretty little bitches got everything I ever wanted, and now I'm going to make sure they get exactly what they deserve. Does that make me sound awful? Sorry, but as every pretty little liar knows, sometimes the truth's ugly-and it always hurts.
I'll be watching ...
Mwah!
-A ~ Sara Shepard

In Technologized Desire, the cultural pathologies that mark the panic ecstasy and terminal doom of the posthuman condition are powerfully rehearsed in the language of science fiction. Here, images of prosthetic subjects, zombies, cut-ups and armies of the medieval dead actually slip off the pages of literature to become the terminal hauntology of these technologized times. Technologized Desire is nothing less than a brilliant data screen of future memories. Read it well: it's a survival guide for bodies flatlined by the speed of accelerating technology. ~ Arthur Kroker

May be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads ME that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to ME, as a pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As ~ Herman Melville

There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake. ~ Jonathan Swift

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. ~ Bertrand Russell

There's something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she's only measured water in it. ~ Erma Bombeck

Wesley and most of his descendants developed a doctrine of Scripture that focused on its role in transforming the believer's inner being as the ground for reordering behavior. Fundamentalism, on the other hand, developed a doctrine of Scripture that tended to focus on reordering behavior in obedience to a body of propositional truths. ~ Al Truesdale

I wish I had devoted all of my time writing to literature.
Those essays in the 60's, they were insolent, you know, like a young persons work. I wouldn't mind if the essays, at some point, evaporated.
I think fiction .. I think literature .. I think narrative, is what lasts.
I do believe that there is such a thing as truth. But I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art or literature. In literature a truth is something who's opposite is also true. ~ Susan Sontag

Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth. ~ William Carlos Williams

I had studied Russian in college. I had gotten into it first through literature and then just really found it kind of fascinating; of course, this was during the Cold War. So they were kind of the other great enemy that you grew up hearing about. ~ Scott Shane

Education is not a discipline at all. Half vocational, half emptiness dressed up in garments borrowed from philosophy, psychology, literature. ~ Edward Blishen

There are a few people, but a diminishing number, who still believe that Marxism, as an economic system, off era a coherent alternative to capitalism, and socialism has, indeed, triumphed in one country. ~ Herbert Read

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth. ~ Gao Xingjian

Neither is a memoir the same as a biography, which aims for the most objective, factual account of a life. A memoir, as I understand it, makes no pretense of denying its subjectivity. Its matter is one person's memory, and memory by nature is selective and colored by emotion. Others who participated in the events I describe will no doubt remember some details differently, though I hope we would agree on the essential truths. I have taken no liberties with the past as I remember it, used no fictional devices beyond reconstructing conversations from memory. I have not blended characters, or bent chronology to convenience. And yet I have tried to tell a good story. ~ Sonia Sotomayor

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There's so much to be found in literature, especially if you don't have the money to travel or the means to get out of your neighborhood or get off work. ~ Saul Williams

Chinatown is tremendously interesting ... It's a part of the city that hasn't really been explored in crime literature or in any general literature. It's as though Chinatown didn't exist. People write about New York without mentioning Chinatown at all. ~ S.J. Rozan

We walked in wisdom with our shadows, in search of the dead part of ourselves, which would be our shelter. ~ Yvonne Vera

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all. ~ Mary Oliver