Literature Quotes - Page 18

He suddenly saw the enterprise of literature as essentially mad.

Literature has become merely a tool for culture studies.

Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

Milan Kundera

If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Zizek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Zizek on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.

Roger Scruton

Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here…think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.

Alasdair Gray

I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.

Pat Conroy

I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

Pat Conroy

Love has always been the chief business of my life, the only thing I have thought—no, felt—supremely worth while, and I don’t pretend that this experience was not succeeded by others. But at that time, I was innocent, with the innocence of ignorance, I didn’t know what was happening to me. I was without consciousness, that is to say, more utterly absorbed than was ever possible again. For after that first time there was always part of me standing aside, comparing, analysing, objecting: ‘Is this real? Is this sincere?’ All the world of my predecessors was there before me, taking, as it were, the bread out of my mouth. Was this stab in my heart, this rapture, really mine or had I merely read about it? For every feeling, every vicissitude of my passion, there would spring into my mind a quotation from the poets. Shakespeare or Donne or Heine had the exact phrase for it. Comforting, perhaps, but enraging too. Nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own. As the blood dripped from the wound, there was always part of me to watch with a smile and a sneer: ‘Literature! Mere literature! Nothing to make a fuss about!’ And then I would add, ‘But so Mercutio jested as he died!

Dorothy Bussy

To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping.

Richard Flanagan

I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.

Flannery O'Connor

Slang surely, as it is called, comes of, and breathes of the personal

John Henry Newman

Literature not only illuminated another's experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection

Paul Kalanithi

I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say.

Oscar Wilde

I was working in silence seeking no appreciation or respect from any one. And it is always the silence from which great literature is born.

Abhijit Naskar

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

Thomas C. Foster

The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

Robert Macfarlane

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

Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' and it's sad, gay nostalgia.

Truman Capote

Yes, looking through the eyes of literature we may talk about the beauty of sadness! But in the eyes of truth, sadness is just saddening; there is no beauty there, only a touching desperation!

Mehmet Murat ildan

In literature, the reader standing at the threshold of the end of a book harbors no illusion that the end has not come—he or she can see where it finishes, the abyss the other side of the last chunk of text. Which means that the writer is never in danger of ending too soon—or if he does the reader has been so forewarned. This is the advantage a book has over a film—it is the brain that marshals forward the text and controls the precise moment of conclusion of the book, as the density of the pages thins. A film can end without you if you’ve fallen asleep or, because you can’t wait any longer to use the bathroom, slipped out of the darkness of the theatre salon, and missed it. There will never be a form more perfect than the book, which always moves at your pace, that sits waiting for you exactly where you’ve left it and never goes on without you.

John M. Keller

It’s hard to say something about Pushkin to a person who doesn’t know anything about him. Pushkin is a great poet. Napoleon is not as great as Pushkin. Bismarck compared to Pushkin is a nobody. And the Alexanders, First, Second and Third, are just little kids compared to Pushkin. In fact, compared to Pushkin, all people are little kids, except Gogol. Compared to him, Pushkin is a little kid.And so, instead of writing about Pushkin, I would rather write about Gogol.Although, Gogol is so great that not a thing can be written about him, so I'll write about Pushkin after all.Yet, after Gogol, it’s a shame to have to write about Pushkin. But you can’t write anything about Gogol. So I’d rather not write anything about anyone.

Daniil Kharms

Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

with you, the sense i have lost my place in a bookor simply lost — misplaced the memorywhich isn't in the last place where I looked.a thought that the clouds don't move — that it is wewho thunder past — there it is! an old vacation,a train ride — sense of immobility.as sky and forest scroll past in relation,we are not moved, pretend to love the view,resort at length to scripted conversationby a poet-turned-screenwriter who didn't want this job, career gone grossly wrongand now drafts action film scripts wholly two-dimensional unless you choose to don the 3d glasses that do not stay on —

Joshua Ip

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

W.B. Yeats

The core – and perhaps unexpected – thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns – and in this sense simplify.

Alain de Botton

Literature recounts history, explores knowledge, narrates universal themes of human existence, actives human conscience, enhances understanding of human motives, and explicates the nuances of human behavior.

Kilroy J. Oldster

It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical.

Aldous Huxley

Yes, I am confusing literature with life. I'm declaring my own ordinary life to be a work of literature.

Tadeusz Konwicki

Tell me of your Willoughbys, Heathcliffs and Wickhams in literature and I will tell you I met them all.

Shannon L. Alder

Poetry and visions, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdycommon sense of a burgher-class in the making.

Hope Mirrlees

O, I do read Indian novels sometimes. But you know, Ms Rupinder, what we Indians want in literature, at least the kind written in English, is not literature at all, but flattery. We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful, sensitive, profound, valorous, wounded, tolerant and funny beings. All that Jhumpa Lahiri stuff. But the truth is, we are absolutely nothing of that kind. What are we, then, Ms Rupinder? We are animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbour's children in five minutes, and our own in ten. Keep this in mind before you do any business in this country.

Aravind Adiga

Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey. The traveler in space or time is an explorer who happens upon utopia. He (or, more recently, she) meets its people, usually at first its ordinary people, observes them at work and play, sees their dwellings and their cities... The traveler is, as are we, the more prepared to accept the validity and desirability of the general principles for having seen with his own eyes its effects in the daily life of its inhabitants.

Krishan Kumar

That's the beauty and the curse of the 'engrafted word'... it all comes down to interpretation.

Amy Marie

The artistic creation of the poet, painter, photographer, and writer is a reflection of the artist’s inner world. The agenda of consciousness that spurs all forms of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but to portray its inward significance to the creator. A great poem, painting, photograph, and written composition fully express what the creator feels, in the deepest sense, about the distinctively depicted image that captured their imagination.

Kilroy J. Oldster

He loved words, and he would admit that he was playing with them all the time. He was obsessive about the rhythm of the sentence, and would add a word, subtract a word. [about Truman Capote]

Deborah Kerr

Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey... First comes the picture of a happy people in a beautiful and well-ordered setting; then comes the lecture on how it all came about, how it works, and, by implication, how it might be made to work in the traveller's own society.

Krishan Kumar

Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription.

Jeanette Winterson

Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?

Jeanette Winterson

Say a day without the ever.

William Shakespeare

[Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.

Amos Tversky

It is not enough for the hand to touch a book and turn its pages. The pages of a book must touch the heart.

J.E.B. Spredemann

This compulsion to an activity without respite, without variety, without result was so cruel that one day, noticing a swelling over his stomach, he felt an actual joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a tumor that would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with anything further, since it was this malady that was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end. If indeed, at his period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle.

Marcel Proust

He had so long since ceased to direct his life toward any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of quotidian satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself that he would remain all his life in that condition, which only death could alter.

Marcel Proust

Say you've just read Faulkner's 'Barn Burning'. Like the son in the story, you've sensed the faults in your father's character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable, left alone you'd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem. The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal - of the self and the world outside the circle of blood. You've never had this conversation before, not with anyone. And even as its happening you understand that just as your father's troubles with the world - emotional frailty, self-doubt, incomplete honesty - will not lead him to set it on fire, your own loyalty will never be the stuff of tragedy. You will not turn bravely and painfully from your father, as the boy in the story does, but foresake him, without regret. And as you accept that separation, it seems to happen; your father's sad, fleshy face grows vague, and you blink it away and look up to where your teachers leans against his desk, one hand in a coat pocket, the other rubbing his bum knee as he listens desolately to the clever bore behind you saying something about bird imagery.

Tobias Wolff

Writing evinces the soul of an active mind and every era produced persons whom devoted their being to exploring the mysteries of life, seeking to discern answers pertaining how to resolve the complexities and paradoxes of life.

Kilroy J. Oldster

I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds....it is an absolute fact---so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby]

Maxwell Perkins

The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry, are most extraordinary.... You once told me you were not a natural writer—my God! You have plainly mastered the craft, of course; but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this. [about The Great Gatsby]

Maxwell Perkins

Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.

Claire Colebrook

Literature is analysis after the event.

Doris Lessing

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

What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?

Jeanette Winterson

But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?

Jeanette Winterson

Even if a poem is beautiful and memorable, it’s not like an advertising jingle or propaganda, which attempt to convince and control. Poems seek to confuse, disabuse, enlarge understanding, and make people ask questions and think for themselves.

Rachel Zucker

Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.

Jeanette Winterson

Progress is not one of those floating comparatives, so beloved of our friends in advertising, we need a context, a perspective. What are we better than? Who are we better than? Examine this statement: Most people are better off. Financially? socially? educationally? medically? spiritually? I dare not ask if you are happy? Are you happy?

Jeanette Winterson

I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.

Jeanette Winterson

To write? Because all this is ging to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left we nothing, we would be naked on earth.

James Slater

Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.

Jeanette Winterson

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Literature Quotes - Page 18

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