Literature Quotes - Page 17

I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.

Jorge Luis Borges

A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him.

Philip Zaleski

....And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time

George Orwell

We bite back the things we can't say and we cushion every surface for the inevitable moment when they all come fighting out.

Moïra Fowley-Doyle

In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

Line in nature is not found;Unit and universe are round;In vain produced, all rays return;Evil will bless, and ice will burn.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now, Mr. Palomar thinks, they would have thought they had projected their gaze into the heaven of Plato's ideas, or in the immaterial space of the postulates of Euclid; but instead, thanks to some misdirection or other, this sight has been granted to me, who fear it is too beautiful to be true, too gratifying to my imaginary universe to belong to the real world. But perhaps it is this same distrust of our senses that prevents us from feeling comfortable in the universe. Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself is this: stick to what I see.

Italo Calvino

Great Literature is simply language charged to the utmost with meaning

Ezra Pound

You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight of you.

J.M. Coetzee

Everybody wants to have intimate conversations, but the smart fellows don't give out, only the fools. The smart fellows talk intimately about the fools, and examine them all over and give them advice.

Saul Bellow

They sat a few meters apart, speaking very rarely, and there was really only the noise of turning pages (…) Where Hans Hubermann and Erik Vandenburg were ultimately united by music, Max and Liesel were held together by the quiet gathering of words."Hi, Max.""Hi, Liesel."They would sit and read.

Markus Zusak

The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that's the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you'll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone's constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it's - if you'll forgive my language - it's bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that's how they like it. They don't transform, they don't stop to smell the roses, they don't sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood - Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren't waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They're not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel - that's finished.

Paul Murray

You either see it or you don't

Brian Selznick

I want all the books on the she

E.L. Konigsburg

What would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.

André Gide

To tell the truth, my dear count, I must own that of all nauseating human emanations, literature is one of those which disgust me most. I can see nothing in it but compromise and flattery. And I go so far as to doubt whether it can be anything else.

André Gide

Since language is the only tool with which writers can reflect and shape a culture, it must be transformed into art. Language is not a limitation on the art of literature; it is a glorification. It has been the scaffolding inside which nations and philosophies have been built, and the language of literature has added the ornamental pediment by which the culture is remembered.

E.L. Konigsburg

I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress.

Norman Mailer

The emotional pattern seems to be something like, “[Karl] Polanyi, a person of the left like me, says many true things, beautifully. Therefore his tales about what happened in economic history must be true.” Marx before him got similar treatment. Lately the more eloquent of the environmentalists, such as Wendell Berry, get it too. People want to believe that beauty is truth. A supporting emotional frame on the left arises from the very idea of historical progress: “We must be able to do so much better than this wretched capitalism.” It is not true, but it motivates.

Deirdre N. McCloskey

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through...ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly.

Jonathan Franzen

Literature destabilizes thought by breaking open language and smuggling in sound, rhythm, and image--an invasion of aesthetics. More easily than analytic writing, poetry can emancipate itself from the standard definitions of words, enabling a breakthrough to new (and perhaps wayward or even nonsensical) meaning, which can then develop after the fact--different at each new reading. Literary language is presumptuous. It dips into the unknown in order to get nearer to a truth different from that of the superficially visible. As the poet Franz Josef Czernin described it, it is as though one step after another into emptiness could become a ladder. Literary writing can take the writers themselves by surprise; it can disturb and disappoint them--for stirring up turmoil is inherent in metaphor. Thus with every flash of understanding that comes from hearing or reading a poem, the fundamental work of thinking is taken up anew.

Marie Luise Knott

A union of literary and scientific cultures – there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come ... Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind.

Oliver Sacks

Behind every Plagiarism there is Google

Vikash Shrivastava

I will never see the day where I choose to fall upon my own sword of refuge. In knowing this, I also know that you will never ultimately defeat me; for my life is my own, and I will see to it accordingly.

Danish Sayanee

Reading literary works enlightened and sheltered me; now I'm paying back by writing.--"My Confession

Zoë S. Roy

POLONIUS : My Lord, I will use them according to their desert.HAMLET : God's bodykins man, better. Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.

William Shakespeare

Now what I like about lit is that though you feel you know the characters involved, you don’t – you get all the benefits of having a relationship, with none of the mess.

Joshua Cohen

let us start by picturing the Japan archipelago lying in the sea by the Chinese mainland. If its proximity allowed it to become part of the Sinosphere and acquire a written culture, its distance benefited the development of indigenous writing. The Dover Strait, separating England and France, is only 34 kilometers (21 miles) wide. A fine swimmer can swim across it. In contrast, the shortest distance between Japan and the Korean Peninsula is five or six times greater, and between Japan and the Chinese mainland, twenty-five times greater. The current, moreover, is deadly. . . . Japan's distance from China gave it political and cultural freedom and made possible the flowering of its own writing.

Minae Mizumura

And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?"If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.

Donna Tartt

She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after everyone else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.

Ernest Hemingway

In literature, as in love, one can only speak for himself.

Andrew Lang

I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.

Paul Kalanithi

In the best day.

Pankaj Mishra (#iampm)

When, while, while when you walk.

Pankaj Mishra (#iampm)

No camouflage.

Pankaj Mishra (#iampm)

Will I ever see the mountains or am I doomed to roam the flatlands?

Jessica-Lynn Barbour

Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too.

Neil Gaiman

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

Mark Twain

Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white?

Virginia Woolf

Literature and film in my opinion are like saloons where bottles have no labels. I want to taste each one myself and figure out which is what. If I'm denied this by labelling, then my entertainment is considerably lessened.

Saadat Hasan Manto

True love finds its own waysTo spread goodness, always.

Ana Claudia Antunes

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.

Joan Didion

Stories shape the world.

Lance Conrad

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.

Rabih Alameddine

Literature is the product of a deep-seated need for honesty. Hence, those who lie most are struck most deeply by it, and those who are honest have no need for it.

Anthony Marais

Of Books and Scribes there are no end:This Plague--and who can doubt it?Dismays me so, I've sadly pennedAnother book about it.

Robert W. Service

Quote of the day."Al, for want of anything better to do, is standing nodding his head. This reminds Faron of those stupid dogs that people put in their cars, that when the car moves, the dogs frantically nod their heads, like some demented, freshly graduated psychologist, with their first patients.

Gary Edward Gedall

Of everythingI have ever endured,YOUareMy Favourite Tragedy.

Meraaqi

There is a part of everything which is unexplored,because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.

Guy de Maupassant

The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it.

Annie Proulx

Starving artist: starving for affection, starving for attention

Jessica-Lynn Barbour

We dreamt of a crappy apartment somewhereMaking love while we let the midnight airFlow through the open window, into our closed heartsLeft bitter from heartbreak and too much time apart

Jessica-Lynn Barbour

Everything is still everything.The Poem Remains.

R.M. Engelhardt (TALON)

Here at last was an Attendant Spirit to liberate us from the spells of Burkhardt or Addington Symonds and challenge the easy antithesis of fantastic and fideistic Middle Ages versus logical and free-thinking Renaissance. And it is a prime justification of medieval studies that if properly pursued they soon dispose of such facile distinctions, and overthrow the barriers of narrow specialism and textbook chronology. In this sense medieval just as much as classical studies make men more humane. It would indeed be hard to separate in Lewis' culture the one from the other: just as hard as it is to understand the Middle Ages themselves without knowing classical literature or the Renaissance without knowing the Middle Ages. This continuity of literature and of learning Lewis not only asserted but embodied.

Jocelyn Gibb

The responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

Natalie Goldberg

A Christian message or moral cannot redeem a text marred by shoddy workmanship.

Susan Gallagher

But now books and men had gone their separate ways. Who has the patience for a book? Only a book.

John M. Keller

If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring.

Georges Bataille

Writers block occurs when a writer has nothing to say. Unfortunately not all writers experience it.

Ron Brackin

We are all orbits of some sort,circling around the world we call our own, and literature...Literature is a compass;

Thabo Jijana

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Literature Quotes - Page 17

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