Literature Quotes - Page 16

... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

Vladimir Nabokov

You want to go to a place where you never lose anything and you keep gaining many things? Go to the Land Of Literature where you gain new paths, new ideas, new lives, new goals, and new souls!

Mehmet Murat ildan

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

STARLIGHT and THUNDERThe Limits of Art is an anthological collection for the ages...for a lifetime. A veritable ark containing excerpts from the sound and fury representative of the finest literary scriveners the world has yet produced.Unequivocally, intellectual nourishment breeds a fire in the mind...a conflagration of ideas and incendiary thoughts that furnish the spirit with conviction and courage to confront the ballet and ballistics of life with passion, wit, tenderness, reason, resolve, humor, imagination and unconditional curiosity.Amidst the clamor brought forth by the alarums and excursions of modern day pontifications, nevertheless, conform and commit your mind to the abolition of ignorance! Accede your sensibilities to the rapture of beauty and her ineffable grace. For beauty is enchantment, a romantic allegiance to the rhapsodic seduction celebratory of the ephemeral, the eternal and the esoteric nature and narratives of fictive splendor, which valorously emanate from this voluptuous volume. This magisterial tome is a figurative brocade of both starlight and thunder transcribed into an insatiable verbal delirium groping toward an unbridled exposition on life’s wonders and mysteries. Drink mightily from its gilded chalice.

Albert Thomas Bifarelli

Books have that strange quality, that being of the frailest and tenderest matter, they outlast brass, iron and marble.

William Drummond

Whenever I encounter writer’s block, I stop writing … with my hands; and I then start writing with my legs.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Words are the only things that last for ever.

William Hazlitt

It’s easy to write a sentence, paragraph, or book. What’s difficult is writing the best sentence, paragraph, or book, you can write.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.

Richard Brookhiser

The cultivation of literary pursuits forms the basis of all sciences, and in their perfection consist the reputation and prosperity of kingdoms.

Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo

A constant discomfort derives from this--writing these sentences, or any other for that matter--I am writing an ad for the war. With that, every utterance about freedom finishes.

Semezdin Mehmedinović

There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story... One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.

A good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.

Ayn Rand

Literature is an invitation to people to discover the world of others and the world of others is the best source to understand and to improve our own world!

Mehmet Murat ildan

What surfaced was the surprising power of our cultural heritage.

Patrick Hennessey

I hate reading poems—school made me hate them. I’d spend hours interpreting one, just to read the memorandum and realize I’d be fucked during exams. I remember making a little asterisk next to every question I struggled with, and at the end of the paper, I’d realize I was looking at the fucking Milky Way.

Danielle Esplin

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.

Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.

Jonathan Franzen

And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf—felt akin to an instance of religious grace.

Jonathan Franzen

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

Ernest Hemingway

Journalism is unreadable, and literature is unread.

You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.

Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison; they sang of the variety and richness of life, of man’s audacity in his strivings towards goodness and beauty.

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.

Literature tries to express the intricate inner beauties of life. Philosophy tries to explain the intricate inner beauties and conflicts of thoughts.

Debasish Mridha

My idea of literature, as I have often said, is that it should save lives. My idea of literature is that it once did save lives, and was of consequence in that way. I believe it can do so again. With every book, to the best of my ability, I try to put this belief in action, even if, as in some of the recent books, the best way to save lives is to cause laughter. Bring on your problems, and I will listen, and bear witness, and when the occasion permits, I will respond, according to certain general rules, on this page, in this hope that here too words may be redemptive.

Literature endures like the universal spirit,And its breath becomes a part of the vitals of all men.

The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

Ayn Rand

A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

Ayn Rand

In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.

Ayn Rand

He had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism was a fatuous dream; he thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.

She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.

These (Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo) not only knit and knot the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity and strength of prose; they not only fill up the pattern of the verse with infinite variety and sober wit; but they give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now contrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and the verse. Here the sounding line concludes; a little further on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will reach their solution on the same ringing syllable. The best that can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air of ease and nature. The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs. He follows three purposes where his rival followed only two; and the change is of precisely the same nature as that from melody to harmony.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

Robert Louis Stevenson

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably. Please don't think that my reaction is the result of intolerance towards my neighbor: the worst discomfort of all comes from hearing myself speak. That's why I try to talk as little as possible. If I prefer writing, it is because I can revise each sentence until I reach the point where - if not exactly satisfied with my words - I am able at least to eliminate those reasons for dissatisfaction that I can put a finger on. Literature - and I mean the literature that matches up to those requirements - is the promised land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.

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.

I wished, first of all, to buy my way into people's good graces with my book so that, in subsequent personal contact, I would find the ground already prepared, and, I reasoned, if I succeeded in implanting in their soules a favorable image of me, this image would in turn shape me; and so, willy-nilly, I would become mature.

Witold Gombrowicz

Popular versus literary—a false divide?

I immediately thought of the stars. Stars. Heavenly bodies formed by huge clouds of dust and gas bumpinginto one another, getting bigger, their gravity getting stronger. Once hot enough, nuclear fusion occurs. And then a star is formed.People are shaped in a similar way—just like stars—excessive amounts of dust and hot gas. And like stars, everyone’s life has a turning point prior to their big bang. The shit show before the creation. Y ’know, one of those moments that can fuck you up.Cleopatra’s was when her father named her joint regent at fourteen. Fucked-up.Bruce Wayne’s when he witnessed his parents get murdered. Fucked-up.Charles Manson’s when his mother sold him for a pitcher of beer. Fucked. Up.Not to mention 'Helter Skelter.

Jorge Enrique Ponce

What is life but a fucked-up factory fabricating fuckups?

Jorge Enrique Ponce

Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses.-James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz

James Lee Schmidt

Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

Estragon: You see, you feel worse when I'm with you. I feel better alone, too.Vladmir: Then why do you always come crawling back?Estragon: I don't know.

Feeling its power, one Civil War paper trumpeted that Milton and Homer were for another age but for this one was the New York Herald.

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

Reading is an intimate act, perhaps more intimate than any other human act. I say that because of the prolonged (or intense) exposure of one mind to another.

There are people who, the more you do for them, the less they will do for themseselves.

The discovery of the horror tale at an early age was fortuitous for me. This sort of tale serves, in many ways, the very same purpose as fairy tales did in our childhood. It operates as a theater of the mind in which internal conflicts are played out. In these tales we can parade the most reprehensible aspects of our being: cannibalism, incest, parricide. It allows us to discuss our anxieties and even to contemplate the experience of death in absolute safety.And again, like a fairy tale, horror can serve as a liberating or repressive social tool, and it is always an accurate reflection of the social climate of its time and the place where it gets birthed.

Guillermo del Toro

Real life often ends badly, like our marriage did, Pat. And literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for people to endure nobly.

This reasoning is based on the wishful thinking that genius can only be earned through education and hard work. It denies the time-proven truth that genius can strike like a random bolt of lightning, at any time in any place, even in a humble glover's home in a small town in Elizabethan England.

A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves us, as any marriage would, and just as no marriage is exactly the same as another, so each of us interprets a story differently, feels for it differently.

There is something in this January Siberian landscape that overpowers, oppresses, stuns. Above all, it is its enormity, its boundlessness, its oceanic limitlessness. The earth has no end here; the world has no end. Man is no created for such measureless. For him a comfortable, palpable, serviceable measure is the measure of his village, his field, street, house. At sea, the size of the ship's deck will be such a measure. Man is created for the kind of space that he can traverse at one try, with a single effort.

Ryszard Kapuściński

I call that creativity," Orville said. "The purpose of literature is to teach you how to THINK, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated events is the only way we are equipped to understand patterns in the real world.

Catherine Lowell

I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.

Jorge Luis Borges

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.

Jorge Luis Borges

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

it would be fairer to say I have traveled widely, without ever leaving my own native soil, I've traveled, one might say, through literature, each time I've opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout my odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I'd just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters

Alain Mabanckou

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