Literature Quotes

Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room-the pool table, snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which Henry sat, motionless, a glass in his hand and the cigarette burning low between his fingers. For a moment his face, pale and watchful as a ghost's, would be caught in the headlights and then, very gradually, it would slide back into the dark.

Donna Tartt

What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.

Roman Payne

Teaching others, he corrected himself.

Dejan Stojanovic

All those big words produce disgust today.

Dejan Stojanovic

It is easy to see the glow but hard to recognize the awakening of silence.

Dejan Stojanovic

The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.

Dejan Stojanovic

Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.

Dejan Stojanovic

A word into the silence thrown always finds its echo somewhere where silence opens hidden lexicons.

Dejan Stojanovic

To expect to be kissed having bad breath is the secret of a fool.

Dejan Stojanovic

No reason for a feverish rush For we will all arrive in the same place At the right time. Justice will be served. There will be no better or worse, No big and small, no rewards, no punishment, No guilt, no judges, no hierarchies; Only silent equality.

Dejan Stojanovic

There are no clear borders, Only merging invisible to the sight.

Dejan Stojanovic

In the biggest and the smallest I sleep but at the same place I stay.

Dejan Stojanovic

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

Dejan Stojanovic

He awaits himself while walking, out of the icy circle to escape.

Dejan Stojanovic

Instead of imitating me, you simply loiter.

Dejan Stojanovic

In the end, the world returns to a grain.

Dejan Stojanovic

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

E.A. Bucchianeri

The parrot had a range of phrases. His own name ('Niko, Niko'), the name of his original owner and now 'Stavros'. Occasionally he would also say 'Panagia mou', which could be an expression of piety but also a gentle expletive, depending on how it was said. With the parrot it was hard to tell. It did not sound pious.

Victoria Hislop

These two oo in "book" are like the two eyes of a reader who fell in love with a story.

Stefanos Livos

Sence and Sensibility, for instance, came out in three separate volumes, as did Pride and Prejudice (so the next time you read one of the ubiquitous time-travel Austen adaptations and somebody picks up a single-volume first edition, you can hit your nerd buzzer and say "wrong!").

Amy Smith

She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses…Orlando then came to the conclusion (opening half-a-dozen books)…that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea…next (here were half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that literature since it all these dinners must be growing very corpulent; next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the Influence of this upon that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle’s sound-proof room at Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very delicate…

Virginia Woolf

Sang Ly, we are literature-our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow. Literature has been called a handbook for the art of being human.

Camron Wright

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that’s not the word.

Ander Monson

Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature.

Roman Payne

Journey through the Power of the Rainbow represents a condensed compendium of literary efforts from a life dedicated to transforming the themes of injustice, grief, and despair that we all encounter during some unavoidable point of our existence into a sustainable life-affirming poetics of passionate creativity, empowered spiritual vision, and inspired commitment.

Aberjhani

A group of ten prisoners from Dachau, I was with them, we hid in the forest to wait for the Americans. The Germans had already left everything behind. We had food but no weapons. For days we could hear bombs exploding around us. We just wanted to survive long enough for the Americans to control the territory. We didn’t want to die. At that point, our prison uniforms were the only things to keep us from being shot on the spot by the Americans. That was all we had. Who would the Americans believe? Real prisoners or guards dressed as prisoners? Those devils might even say we were the Germans. This was our nightmare.

Sergio Troncoso

We are all one. Everything is meaningless, and yet at the same time meaningful. Everything matters and doesn’t matter just as much," Wisdom said and looked beyond time.(Nakoma, by Gala.J)

Gala.J

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

Sara Sheridan

There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called "ordinary" and accounted as "the majority," and who actually do make up the great majority of society. In their novels and stories writers most often try to choose and present vividly and artistically social types which are extremely seldom encountered in real life, and which are nevertheless more real than real life itself. Podkolyosin, viewed as a type, in perhaps exaggerated, but he is hardly unknown. How many clever people having learned from Gogol about Podkolyosin at once discover that great numbers of their friends bear a terrific resemblance to Podkolyosin. They knew before Gogol that their friends were like Podkolyosin, except they did not know yet that that was their name...Nevertheless the question remains before us: what is the novelist to do with the absolutely "ordinary" people, and how can he present them to readers so that they are at all interesting? To leave them out of a story completely is not possible, because ordinary people are at every moment, by and large, the necessary links in the chain of human affairs; leaving them out, therefore, means to destroy credibility. To fill a novel entirely with types or, simply for the sake of interest, strange and unheard-of people, would be improbable and most likely not even interesting. In our opinion the writer must try to find interesting and informative touches even among commonplace people. When, for example, the very nature of certain ordinary persons consists precisely of their perpetual and unvarying ordinariness, or, better still, when in spite of their most strenuous efforts to life themselves out of the rut of ordinariness and routine, then such persons acquire a certain character of their own-the typical character of mediocrity which refuses to remain what it is and desires at all costs to become original and independent, without having the slightest capacity for independence.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read.

Henry David Thoreau

The mythic voice rising from literature and art allows us to be humane. We are not humane because of political power, or education, or even religion. We are humane because we recognize the humanity of others. The writer and the artist appeal to that humanity. For that reason, literature and art are the bones of civilization.

Jack Cady

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart.

Salman Rushdie

I am no longer a writer. Just an emotion. An emotion that is unable to stay within its own body, and is therefore, trying to make its way into yours.

Zaeema J. Hussain

His feet went banging down some stairs. He closed his eyes. They went through cinders and dirt, his heels gathering small windrows of trash. A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. The rusting carcass of an automobile passed slowly on his right. Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea. He lay with his head on the moldy upholstery of an old car seat among packingcrates and broken shoes and suncrazed rubber toys in the dark. Something warm was running on his chest. He put up a hand. I am bleeding. Unto my death.

Cormac McCarthy

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them.

Vladimir Nabokov

Our thoughts of literary renaissance should always center themselves on the removal of superstition, meanness, indignity and ignorance.

Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

Moon is the light from a lantern in heaven

Munia Khan

Good literature is a lifeboat! Every time you feel you are sinking, jump on it!

Mehmet Murat ildan

A dessert to a deserter in the desert burst, "You trust your thirst. And you are too hot! You scream for ice cream. And believe it or not, I may not be your first. But I might be your lust! Give it a shot...

Ana Claudia Antunes

Technically, you cannot really own a book you bought; you can only own the sheets of paper your copy is printed on; unless, of course, you are the book’s publisher.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Such fascinating things, libraries. She closes her eyes. She couldwalk inside and step into a murder, a love story, a complete accountof somebody else’s life, or mutiny on the high seas. Such potential;such adventure—there’s a shimmer of malfeasance in trying otherways of being.

Ashley Hay

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

Ernest Hemingway

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.

Annie Dillard

According to the scientist, time is interminable and inexhaustible. The artist is more inclined to relate the passage of time as a subject involving the randomness of memory and humankind’s ability to create vivid recollections. Astute artists depict collections of disjointed thought fragments in paintings and literature in order to stir the pot of human consciousness. Art rests upon the correspondence between the impact of external experience and the finiteness of human life. An artist attempts to articulate answers to the mystery of being by rendering a thoughtful interpretation of the world that we occupy and experience through our senses.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Treat your mind like a museum, not a warehouse

Ignassen Mather

It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain a mere dependent (and thus conservative) form of social discourse. Reversal plays a double role in this novel (MONSIEUR VENUS), for it is not only a formal strategy bearing on citation, but itself a citation as well; one more cliché mobilized from the fin-de-siecle reserve.

Janet Beizer

The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice, the decadents' approach to the language of fiction frequently leans towards the baroque and the obscure.

Asti Hustvedt

There is much to discover that's not on the back cover!

E.A. Bucchianeri

Knowing, above all, that I would come looking, and find what he had left for me, all that remained of The Jungle Book in the pocket of his doctor’s coat, that folder-up, yellowed page torn from the back of the book, with a bristle of thick, coarse hairs clenced inside. Galina, says my grandfather’s handwriting, above and below a child’s drawing of the tiger, who is curved like the blade of a scimitar across the page. Galina, it says, and that is how I know to find him again, in Galina, in the story he hadn’t told me but perhaps wished he had.

Téa Obreht

[On Female Attraction to Men in Uniform] That male military persona feeds a subconscious, passive-aggressive female desire to dominate the warrior as he is perceived an iconic example of masculinity (particularly amongst traditionally warlike cultures). The damsel in distress theme always struck me as embodying this: the hapless, innocently beautiful woman unwittingly enraptures the heroic male so completely that he would risk all to submit to her at his own peril, and quite in spite of it.

Tiffany Madison

Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

Kathy Acker

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.

Cathy Caruth

I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language.

Aberjhani

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.

Zora Neale Hurston

I think it all basically breaks down to something like this: You have to look and feel great first. If you eat well, exercise and get enough sleep, you will have ample energy and the proper self-confidence to create and produce beyond your wildest dreams! Looking great and radiating positive energy, while presenting your highest quality work, is what will always make you the most valuable and only logical choice in whatever it is that you reach for.

Jennifer Elisabeth

There used to be a rubbish heap under the great tree in Dhoby Ghaut with a sarabat stall parked next to it. It was a low, sprawling rubbish heap made up of the usual things—refuse from dustbins, paper, old tins and slippers and leaves from the tree above. Then one day, people forgot about it. They found a new dumping place and the old rubbish heap settled low on the ground. Time passed and its contents became warm and rich and fertile and people living in the area would take away potfuls of it to plant flowers in.Somehow, a rose cutting, slim as a cheeping chicken’s leg and almost brown, appeared on the rubbish heap one day.

Gregory Nalpon

Some books must be sipped slowly like a strong bourbon. Most books must be devoured more than once because as you age you distill more.

Brandi L. Bates

Both tears and sweat are salty. but none of them are faulty. the tears can get you somewhere, the sweat will make you only wet.

Ana Claudia Antunes

The first time Kiya met Hapi was over a year ago. On that day, she was at the temple - not to sell pigeons and bread as usual, but to pray and offer sacrifices on the altar of Horus - the God of protection.

Mirette Baghat

Yet Nathan appreciated being alone as he sipped his cold glass of beer. It gave him time to think. In the next thirty minutes or so, the flight he was waiting for would land and his day would begin. It was autumn in the capital, and the clear skies created an illusion of a city that was at peace with itself.

Marko Phiri

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