Literature Quotes - Page 23

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

Chinua Achebe

Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other

Anton Chekhov

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

Oscar Wilde

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

C.S. Lewis

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

Oscar Wilde

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Donald Barthelme

All I wanted was to be loved for myself." (Erik)

Gaston Leroux

Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!

Anne Frank

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

Italo Calvino

Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

Jane Austen

He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.

José Rizal

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

Charles Dickens

Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.

Jane Yolen

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Without literature, life is hell.

Charles Bukowski

Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.

Witold Gombrowicz

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Aldous Huxley

Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

William Shakespeare

I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.

Margaret Mitchell

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.

Chaim Potok

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Maybe at the very bottom of it... I really don't like God. You know, it's silly to say I don't like God because I don't believe in God, but in the same sense that I don't like Iago, or the Reverend Slope or any of the other villains of literature, the god of traditional Judaism and Christianity and Islam seems to me a terrible character. He's a god who will... who obsessed the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don't worship him in the right way. Now I realise that many people don't believe in that any more who call themselves Muslims or Jews or Christians, but that is the traditional God and he's a terrible character. I don't like him.

Steven Weinberg

I am about tribal feminine power. As a leader, I may stumble but my essence lives to the future-- of my people, of my literature, of my art. And when a tribesman turn against its leader, that tribe will become two. It may faulter my course, but it will not stifle my ending. I rule only among my believers.

Kristie LeVangie

I have hopein who I am becoming.I have belief in every scar and disgraceful wordI have ever spokenor been toldbecause it is still teaching meand I have hope in who I am becoming.They say it takes 756 days to run to someone you loveand they also say that the only romance worth fighting foris the one with yourselfand I know by nowthat they say a lot of things,people talking everywherewithout saying a word,but if it took me all those years to learn myselfor teach myselfhow to look into the mirrorwithout breaking itI know for a fact that it was a fight worth fighting.I stood up for my own head and so did my heartand we are coming to terms with ourselves.Shaking hands, saying ”let’s make this workfor we have places to goand people to seeand we will need each other”So I have hopein who I am becoming.It’s Julyand I have hope in who I am becoming.

Charlotte Eriksson

There is nothing in the world which an artist cannot recreate into something poetic, ennobling. And why do we read these things? They are not facts, they do not improve our business skills, our techniques in manufacturing goods, the management of a home. That is what most of you will be doing anyway. We read these because they teach us about people, we can see ourselves in them, in their problems. And by seeing ourselves in them, we clarify ourselves, we explain ourselves to ourselves, so we can live with ourselves…

F. Sionil Jose'

Your page stands against you and says to you that you are a thief.

Marcus Valerius Martialis

I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language.

Aberjhani

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

Alain de Botton

Writers are not just writers, they are creators of worlds, sculptors of the mind, they are architects of language.

Jamie L. Harding

Words are the residue that I was there, that I loved my wife, that I kissed my children goodnight, that I sacrificed my life for them. Words are a curse. Life is a curse. Words escape life. Life escapes words. What in God's name am I? How does someone name a God? What is it to name yourself?

Sergio Troncoso

I'm not saying that French books are talented, and intelligent, and noble. They don't satisfy me either. But they're less boring than the Russian ones, and not seldom one finds in them the main element of creative work––a sense of personal freedom, which Russian authors don't have. I can't remember a single new book in which the author doesn't do his best, from the very first page, to entangle himself in all possible conventions and private deals with his conscience. One is afraid to speak of the naked body, another is bound hand and foot by psychological analysis, a third must have "a warm attitude towards humanity," a fourth purposely wallows for whole pages in descriptions of nature, lest he be suspected of tendentiousness... One insists on being a bourgeois in his work, another an aristocrat, etc. Contrivance, caution, keeping one's own counsel, but no freedom nor courage to write as one wishes, and therefore no creativity.- A Boring Story

Anton Chekhov

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.

Virginia Woolf

We knock upon silence for an answering music.

Archibald MacLeish

(the modern writer’s aim is) general revelation by suggestion (and) making a very tiny part do for a whole.

Sean O'Faolain

People won't see Imagination in something that doesn't relate to their experience because of their own mental limitations. I want people to escape the expected and ordinary, to escape the regular expectations of a story, and truly step into a different world of literature.

Lionel Suggs

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

Leonard Bernstein

I travel to know the life of great souls in the pages of a book.

Lailah Gifty Akita

It is not possible to express the most precious insights, To see all that craves to be seen, To visit even the closest neighbors in the universe, To learn all that needs to be learned, To live without dying, And I am sad about it.But I livedAnd I am happy about that.

Dejan Stojanovic

Was it worth while to lay— with infinite exertion—a roof I can't live under? —All those blueprints, closings of gaps,measurings, calculations? A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do. I'm naked, ignorant, a naked man fleeing across the roofs who could with a shade of difference be sitting in the lamplight against the cream wallpaper reading—not with indifference—about a naked man fleeing across the roofs.

Adrienne Rich

Creating means living.

Dejan Stojanovic

If you read great literature every day, you will uplift your spirit, soul and self.

Lailah Gifty Akita

...empathy is the driving force behind the experience of emotions in narratives (Keen, 2006; Mar et al., 2006; Oatley, 2011).

Mikkel Wallentin

Narratives are universally used for mediating emotional experiences. The purpose of aesthetic objects has been defined, in part, as 'the awakening, intensifying, or maintaining of definite emotional states' (Lee, 1913: 99–100). When we read or hear stories, we put aside our own goals and plans, and we temporarily replace our own goals and plans with those of the story characters.

Mikkel Wallentin

A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.

Joseph Campbell

Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?

Idries Shah

Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.

Idries Shah

A small amount of good literature can often teach more about the inner life than volumes of psychology.

Thomas Moore

Literature should be a kind of revolutionary manifesto against established morality and established society.

Guo Moruo

The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Whom boasts about his happiness, cause doesn't got it!

Válgame

If you tell me bad things about someone, you're telling bad things about me behind me

Válgame

Who is the most worthy of admiration, musician or audience?Probably the musician will tell that his audience and the musician that his audience

Válgame

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

Marcel Proust

Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name--and therefore live--afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.

Adrienne Rich

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.

Zora Neale Hurston

I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.

Bell Hooks

If improving conditions in the workplace for women had been a central agenda for feminist movement in conjunction with efforts to obtain better paying jobs for women and finding jobs for unemployed women of all classes, feminism would have been seen as a movement addressing the concerns of all women.

Bell Hooks

Critical interventions around race did not destroy the women's movement; it became stronger . . . It shows us that no matter how misguided feminist thinkers have been in the past, the will to change, the will to create the context for struggle and liberation, remains stronger than the need to hold on to wrong beliefs and assumptions.

Bell Hooks

Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.(Southey's reply to Charlotte Bronte)

Robert Southey

Previous 1 … 21 22 23 24 25 … 41 Next

Literature Quotes - Page 23

Related Topics