Literature Quotes - Page 22

You must be more gentle, dear, more sedate,' Ellen told her daughter. 'You must not interrupt gentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than they do. Gentlemen do not like forward girls.

Margaret Mitchell

Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he’s wrong.

Chad Harbach

She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.

Marcel Proust

It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvium wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents of every hue. Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.

Roman Payne

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none

Jules Renard

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries

Italo Calvino

I shouted the perfect words to scare him off. It was just the delivery (and only the delivery) that made me sound like a twelve-year-old girl with pee running down her leg. I felt dirty and stupid.

Graham Parke

I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

Laurence Sterne

I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.

Mordecai Richler

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

Oscar Wilde

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

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

Henry James

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

John Irving

Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.

Jonathan Stroud

The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.

John Green

We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.

F. Sionil Jose'

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

H.L. Mencken

You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.

Walt Whitman

I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.

Gabriel García Márquez

That cloak of love you were wearing—he’s torn it to shreds, undoing the seams of trust that held it together. How can you ever wear those shreds?

Antonia Michaelis

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

Christopher Hitchens

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

Walt Whitman

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.

Leo Tolstoy

I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

Janet Fitch

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

Charles Caleb Colton

What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

Brent Weeks

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

Italo Calvino

Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible.

Bart D. Ehrman

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

Anne Frank

As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again.

Margaret Mitchell

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

Oscar Wilde

It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.

Isaac Asimov

...and it is also possible, that Saadat Hasan dies, but Manto remains alive.

Saadat Hasan Manto

I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But, probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clapsed her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: 'Oh, Hermann...." It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe.

Vladimir Nabokov

Whatever is produced in haste goes hastily to waste.

Saadi

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

William S Burroughs

Ela acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam" | "She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed

Clarice Lispector

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

John Ruskin

Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.

Nadeem Aslam

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.

D.H. Lawrence

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.

Romain Gary

have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?

Walt Whitman

It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

Mark Twain

Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.

Barbara Kingsolver

I do not write with ease, nor am I ever pleased with anything I write. And so I rewrite.

Margaret Mitchell

I like my coffee with cream and my literature with optimism.

Abigail Reynolds

O love, O fire! once he drewWith one long kiss my whole soul throughMy lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.

Alfred Tennyson

I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.

Jane Austen

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

Julian Barnes

Time is a river...and books are boats. Many volumes start down that stream, only to be wrecked and lost beyond recall in its sands. Only a few, a very few, endure the testings of time and live to bless the ages following.

Joseph Fort Newton

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Donna Tartt

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

Edith Wharton

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

Mark Twain

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

Kingsley Amis

My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.

Gene Wolfe

Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.

W.B. Yeats

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Literature Quotes - Page 22

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