Literature Quotes

Only when the flower vase will be itself in bloom, only then we got the real wonder of poetry

George G. Asztalos

Sneakiness was a form of privacy and privacy here was the first loss.

The world of literature is a sacred mirror that shows not the reality around us but the dreams and fears that reality stimulates: It’s not where we live, but life itself.

I love rain because tears can not be seen in rain.

Charlie Chaplin

To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else.

Geography and mileage mean nothing. Separate is a single word that covers all distances that aren't together.

Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.

The way contemporary literature is emerging, soon we can expect "Item poetry" in novels.

My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.-

Fernando Pessoa Ferreira

Literature is what's left standing after the storm.

Mark Rude

Literature is like a subtle concoction of laboriously collected peripherals called words, intellect,thoughts,imagination,creativity and aestheticism brewed together to form a resplendent work of art.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

That was the Old Man’s favorite song. “Blow Ye Trumpet.” Them Negroes was far away from the doings on the plaza where the Old Man was to hang, way out from it. But they sang it loud and clear….Blow ye trumpet blowBlow ye trumpet blow….You could hear their voices for a long way, seemed like they lifted up and carried all the way into the sky, lingering in the air long afterward. And up above the church, high above it, a strange black-and-white bird circled ‘round, looking for a tree to roost on, a bad tree, I expect, so he could alight upon it and get busy, so that it would someday fall and feed the others.

The road to heaven isn’t much of a road,” he was saying. “It’s more like a dusty trail, roughly cut out through the underbrush. Most people don’t even notice it. It doesn’t look like a path at all, so they walk right by. Others see it, but don’t go down it because it’s ugly. Dirty. Difficult. Overgrown. If they took the road to heaven, their progress would be slow, maybe immeasurable. They’d have to give up a lot because the path is narrow.

But you raised a ruckus about and threatened to perform a Julius Caesarian on anybody on anybody who calls April the cruelest month- I was Damn born out of the loins of my father in the spring of April, you claimed. Surgeon, you stood up for the month of buds and bitches like a true Kuon Kunos

Words have the power to make things true if they're said right.

Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path. I shall be a litterateur, at least, all my life; nor would I abandon the hopes which still lead me on for all the gold in California.”EDGAR ALLAN POE TO FREDERICK WILLIAM THOMASFEBRUARY 14, 1849

To influence a person is to give him one's own soul.

Do you know what the worst thing about literature is? said Don Pancracio. I knew, but I pretended I didn't. What? I said. That you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense.

Roberto Bolaño

It is interesting to ponder the fact that there is no real difference between what the Western Fascists wanted of literature and what the Bolsheviks want. Let me quote: "The personality of the artist should develop freely and without restraint. One thing, however, we demand: acknowledgement of our creed.” Thus spoke one of the big Nazis, Dr. Rosenberg, Minister of Culture in Hitler's Germany. Another quote: “Every artist has the right to create freely; but we, Communists, must guide him according to plan.” Thus spoke Lenin. Both of these are textual quotations, and their similitude would have been highly diverting had not the whole thing been so very sad.

Vladimir Nabokov

Here rests his head upon the lap of earthA youth to fortune and to fame unknown.Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,And Melancholy marked him for her own.

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.

Great literary works are not measured by the number of words, but by the impact they create.

Luffina Lourduraj

so heavy with sorrow , so full of pain

AvaViolet

I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology.

Time went on grey, uncloured, like a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape unrolled beside her.

this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings....the merry dance of death and trade goes on

People recover differently. Some change cities, some fall in love and some begin writing.

Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places.

There it was, happiness in a backward glance: happiness and the certainty of hope.

Samantha Bruce-Benjamin

Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self-delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving.

Mary Karr

Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself - poor me!

Thoughts are meant to be words and words are meant to be written and what is written becomes a figment of the literature

Let the mind contemplate, let the pen scribble, the oeuvre would be eccentric, peculiar to a reader's eye.

it is not the first language that is all-important, but which language captures the adolescent's imagination when he or she first discovers literature.

Language is no barrier for a lover of words.

There was an inevitability about the road towards each other which encouraged meandering along the route.

It was a wonderful experience. She mistrusted his very slumbers--and she seemed to think I could tell her why! Thus a poor mortal seduced by the charm of an apparition might have tried to wring from another ghost the tremendous secret of the claim the other world holds over a disembodied soul astray amongst the passions of this earth. The very ground on which I stood seemed to melt under my feet. And it was so simple too; but if the spirits evoked by our fears and our unrest have ever to vouch for each other's constancy before the forlorn magicians that we are, then I--I alone of us dwellers in the flesh--have shuddered in the hopeless chill of such a task.

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.

Stephen Leacock

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.

In literature as in love we are astounded by what is chosen by others.

Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult but to the adult in the child.

Anonymous

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

Dean William R. Inge

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

George Bernard Shaw

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal

I am never long even in the society of her I love without yearning for the company of my lamp and my library.

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Eduardo Galeano

A novel is a static thing that one moves through a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

Chaucer I confess is a rough diamond and must be polished e'er he shines.

I can find my biography in every fable that I read.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children and life is the other way around.

Literature is my utopia.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.

Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade: today it is the reverse.

Oh! Let us never never doubt What nobody is sure about.

Science is uneasy with beginnings. Mythology is concerned above all with what happened "in the beginning". Its signature is "Once upon a time".

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