Vietnamese Literature Quotes

Being a mother is never easy... It's about failing, learning, and then failing again. ~ Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Shadows of villages that bordered the horizon looked like women whose backs were bent with the burdens of life. My mother had had to bear hers, and it was now my turn. ~ Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

Too many things have changed. Too much time has passed. I'm different now, a man with a pocketful of unconnected but terribly vivid memories. I was looking to dredge up what I'd long forgotten. Most of all, I am wishing for something to fasten all these gems, maybe something to hold them in a continuity that I can comprehend. ~ Andrew X. Pham

To be up to the eyebrows in a great work of literature is such happiness. ~ William Maxwell

Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the most beloved Buddhist teachers in the West, a rare combination of mystic, poet, scholar, and activist. His luminous presence and the simple, compassionate clarity of his writings have touched countless lives. ~ Joanna Macy

I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called 'The Imp of the Perverse' about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement. ~ John Cusack

Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers. ~ Lord Byron

Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. "I wonder what he's thinking," Howard will say.) ~ Chandler Burr

Long ago we conquered our passions looking at ourselves in the mirror of eternity. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond. ~ Edward Bond

The Koran and the laws of all civilized nations legislate against the vilification of religions. ~ Naguib Mahfouz

As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world. ~ Alison Hawthorne Deming

The true elitists in the literary world are the ones who have become annoyed by literary ambition in any form, who have converted the very meaning of ambition so totally that it now registers as an act of disdain, a hostility to the poor common reader, who should never be asked to do anything that might lead to a pulled muscle. (What a relief to be told there's no need to bother with a book that might seem thorny, or abstract, or unusual.) The elitists are the ones who become angry when it is suggested to them that a book with low sales might actually deserve a prize ( ... ) and readers were assured that the low sales figures for some of the titles could only mean that the books had failed our culture's single meaningful literary test. ~ Ben Marcus

The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own. ~ Lytton Strachey

We seem to have forgotten that the expression "a liberal education" originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further and say, that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply. ~ Anne Rice

Listen, I traipse no I run no I sprint--a fat, impotent ghoul sprung straight from the cellar of my childhood home--past the pregnant girl with five skeletal children and the nun and the synagogue with its windows stoned through and I'm headed directly for my daughter, Sylvia, at her school where she's stationed with classmates of wannabe punks and black boys with their heads shaved and every one of them, apes, gushing out their hormones as I sprint to the edge of the Earth where Sylvia studies the canon of our national literature that I'm desperately trying to forget. ~ Leland Pitts-Gonzalez

Oblivion cures the old wounds. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

I don't know anyone who remembers meeting their parents when they were a baby so i'm just like everybody else. -Zoey (100% Real) ~ Tara Michener

Time spent reading a book, even a bad one, is never wasted. ~ Stewart Stafford

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way
characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works
is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature. ~ Nick Hornby

Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work. ~ Karl Kraus

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

Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder. ~ Mason Cooley

Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists. ~ Henry Miller

Once
God wrote a story
that shook the heaven to the very core.
Love was the only language used;
You and I
were the only characters. ~ Subhan Zein

Here let dead poetry rise once more to life. ~ Dante Alighieri

I didn't realize then that women like her walked on roads of embers. Their life was an endless wait for the husband kidnapped by the police, the missing brother, the son who had been imprisoned. Women who could not sleep because of the fire in their chest. Ali's mother was one of those women, battered by fate. ~ Benyamin

Yasunari Kawabata, the Japanese Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1968, committed suicide in 1971. Two years earlier, in 1969, another great Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima, ended his life in the same way. Since 1895 ,thirteen Japanese novelists and writers have committed suicide, including the author of the Rashomon, Ryunosuko Akutagawa, in 1927. That "continuous tragedy" of Japanese culture during 70 years coincides with the penetration of Western civilization and materialistic ideas into the traditional culture of Japan. Whatever it be, for the poets and the writers of tragedies, civilization will always have an inhuman face and be a threat to humanity. A year before his death, Kawabata wrote "men are separated from each other by a concrete wall that obstructs any circulation of love. Nature is smothered in the name of progress." In the novel The Snow Country, published in 1937 , Kawabata places man's loneliness and alienation in the modern world at the very focus of his reflections. ~ Alija Izetbegovic

Messages written across the chest of women's t-shirts are great, because I can stare at their tits like they are literature. ~ Jarod Kintz

We have so politicized literature today, pigeonholing people into gay male fiction, lesbian fiction, transgender fiction and then other sub-genres within those. There seems to be a feeling like authors should stay in their own box and not write about anybody else, but the thing is, as a writer, you're constantly writing about things that you yourself haven't personally experienced. We should all be free to write about each other as human beings. Some gay men love reading lesbian novels, some straight women love gay male romance, and that richness of reaching across the boundaries helps us further our understanding of each other. ~ Patricia Nell Warren

I was assigned to the office of a recently deceased faculty member; the office hadn't been cleaned out yet, and a few days before the fall term began, I unlocked the door to find a dirty room whose bookshelves were crammed with empty bourbon bottles and crucifixes, mute testimony to the limits of literature as a sustaining comfort in life. ~ Maureen Corrigan

Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise. ~ Leland Ryken

Literature exists so that where one man has lived finely ten thousand may afterward live finely ~ Arnold Bennett

If we care about the children, the grandchildren, the future generations, we need to make sure that they do not become the cannon fodder of the future. ~ Helen Thomas

My interest in words and literature is always changing. And every day of work is different, and it doesn't feel laborious in the way that, say, washing dishes did. I'm quite happy to be doing what I'm doing, and I feel very lucky. ~ Patrick DeWitt

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

Real worth requires no interpreter: its everyday deeds form its emblem. ~ Nicolas Chamfort