Yiddish Literature Quotes

It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

I have another aspect of my career where I'm a scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and I'll say that when you study Yiddish literature, you know a whole lot about forgotten writers. Most of the books on my shelves were literally saved from the garbage. I am sort of very aware of what it means to be a forgotten artist in that sense. ~ Dara Horn

His eyes reflected a softness I had already forgotten in America. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up ~ Susan Sontag

She left the window - and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps - and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer - and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words failed me to express), The lady is ugly! ~ Wilkie Collins

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men. ~ Helen Keller

I love the gothic literature. It always has such great stories with characters bigger than life and the stakes are always high. And because there's always a wolf at the door, the emotions are high; the romance, the sexuality, friendships, and relationships. You don't know if the guy kissing you one minute is going to bite you the next. This heightens all of the sensibilities and emotions, and therefore, it sings to me. And that's where the music comes from. ~ Frank Wildhorn

And while it's all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed. Germaine had the right idea: she was ignorant and lusty, she put her heart and soul into her work. She was a whore all the way through - and that was her virtue! ~ Henry Miller

As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle or a cockchafer, I think. ~ Franz Kafka

I was raised in Catholic school where we were given a lot of heavy literature and a dense, weighty lyric wasn't strange to me. I didn't need everything to be light and simple for me to see the beauty in it. ~ Jennifer Warnes

If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

For some a prologue, for some an epilogue. ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

Everyone was driven to write.It was Gorky's fault--he had announced that "literature should be written by working people",and showed with his own example that an ordinary tramp could become a writer. ~ Anatoli Rybakov

Chance and Destiny have between them woven two-thirds of all history, and of the history of Ireland wellnigh the whole. The literature of a nation, on the other hand, is spun out of its heart. If you would know Ireland - body and soul - you must read its poems and stories. They came into existence to please nobody but the people of Ireland. Government did not make them on the one hand, nor bad seasons on the other. They are Ireland talking to herself. ~ W.B.Yeats

Big Ma didn't need to say any more and she didn't. T.J. was far from her favorite person and it was quite obvious that Stacey and I owed our good fortune entirely to T.J.'s obnoxious personality. ~ Mildred D. Taylor

I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new. ~ Sherman Alexie

There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

There's no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism. ~ Mark Earley

I don't really think in terms of the future of literature. I think literature will be around "forever" - but in a relatively niche way, like jazz and poetry, although probably more widely consumed than jazz and poetry since it's fundamentally a narrative form. And I think that's important and places like Word Riot and The New York Tyrant and n+1 will be responsible for keeping it alive. ~ Nick Antosca

For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul. ~ Robert McKee

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. ~ Harriet Ann Jacobs

Themes that are "too large for adult fiction can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book" - Philip Pullman
(Hunt and Lenz, 2001, p. 122 as cited by Hunt, 2005, p. 204) ~ Philip Pullman

Be careful," Aidan called from the bed. "You don't know what he might do."
"We all know what you'd do, though, don't we? ~ Holly Black

Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature. ~ Oscar Wilde

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter? ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

The ability to forgive is one of man's greatest achievements. ~ Bryant McGill

Men, like bullets, go farthest when they are smoothest. ~ Jean Paul Friedrich Richter

I suppose I've always been attracted to this sort of outsider in general - in literature, in music, politics, whatever - and to the person that is able to be relentlessly themselves. I don't think that I have that quality, that strength of mind. ~ Cillian Murphy

Literature has become my life. ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

Perhaps the truth is that heavy literature blooms in extremes of temperature. ~ Roy Blount, Jr.

After the birth of printing books became widespread. Hence everyone throughout Europe devoted himself to the study of literature ... Every year, especially since 1563, the number of writings published in every field is greater than all those produced in the past thousand years. The Paracelsians have created medicine anew and the Copernicans have created astronomy anew. I really believe that at last the world is alive, indeed seething, and that the stimuli of these remarkable conjunctions did not act in vain. ~ Johannes Kepler

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible. ~ Washington Irving

A lot of (children's literature) beginners get bogged down by morals. A moral should never be driving the story. And a moral should never be confused with a plot. You can't preach to kids, and you can't talk down to them, either. It's amazing how they sense condescension. ~ Patty Smith

I never publicise in advance what I'm going to be singing because I never quite know until I start. I often change my mind halfway through. I sometimes throw in stuff about politics or Shakespeare or do songs in Yiddish. ~ Mandy Patinkin

I always have done work on mythic relations since I started writing. I really want to be a novelist, or at least a writer of imaginative work ... I do try to make my critical studies imaginative and try to write them in ways that are more like literature than philosophy, but I have disappointed myself because I am still so wedded to criticism. ~ Marina Warner

Literature offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; it's the only place where we can keep track of ideas. ~ Reza Aslan

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind. ~ J.M. Coetzee

The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist. ~ Henry Adams

I have a plot, but not much happens. ~ Howard Nemerov

The highest use of the great masters of literature is not literary; it is apart from their superb style and even from their emotional inspiration. The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one's last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns. Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone. ~ G.K. Chesterton