Literature Quotes - Page 25

We all have a book in us. The first step is recognising this. Writing it is a whole new journey.

A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known.

Before he went away, he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the picture that strongly impressed him. She was possible doutbless only in America; American life had smoothed the way for her. She was not fast, nor emancipated, nor crude, nor loud, and there wasn’t in her, of necessity at least, a grain of the stuff of which the adventuress is made.She was simply very successful, and her success was entirely personal. She hadn’t been born with the silver spoon of social opportunity, she had grasped it by honest exertion. You knew her by many different signs, but chiefly, infallibly, by the appearance of her parents. It was her parents who told her story; you always saw how little her parents could have made her. Her attitude with regard to them might vary in different ways. As the great fact on her own side was that she had lifted herself from a lower social plane, done it all herself, and done it by the simple lever of her personality, it was naturally to be expected that she would leave the authors of her mere material being in the shade.(…)But the general characteristic of the self-made girl was that, though it was frequently understood that she was privately devoted to her kindred, she never attempted to impose them on society, and it was striking that, though in some of her manifestations a bore, she was at her worst less of a bore than they. They were almost always solemn and portentous, and they were for the most part of a deathly respectability. She wasn’t necessarily snobbish, unless it was snobbish to want the best. She didn’t cringe, she didn’t make herself smaller than she was, she took on the contrary a stand of her own and attracted things to herself.Naturally she was possible only in America, only in a country where whole ranges of competition and comparison were absent.

Henry James

She’s the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She’s the self-made girl!(…)Well, to begin with, the self-made girl’s a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn’t self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.

Henry James

Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.

Henry James

Some books must be sipped slowly like a strong bourbon. Most books must be devoured more than once because as you age you distill more.

Brandi L. Bates

There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the street, Katya, I felt such a sensation… I have no idea why

Joyce Carol Oates

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl. There hadn’t been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.

Joyce Carol Oates

Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason.

Edward Fahey

I steal a glance when no one is looking. Especially at his neck, when he turns to say something to my mother. That slender neck, with its air of determination, brisk and bold…

Anne Hébert

I clap my hands together. (Where do I get the strength, the burst of energy?) To chase away the ghosts. Dispel my fears. Arrange the dream. Maintain a kind of balance

Anne Hébert

And now the bride begins to move. Little mechanical doll, clinging to her husband’s arm, climbing into the carriage. Her white silk stocking, her elegant shoe.

Anne Hébert

That’s what it means to be out of your mind. To let yourself be carried away by a dream. To give it room, let it grow wild and thick, until it overruns you.

Anne Hébert

I seek to take my audience on an emotional roller-coaster ride, a journey of laughter and tears and every sentiment in between.

Marc Royston

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t. . . . I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child. . . . True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known. . . . Besides, isn’t it true that promotion is expensive? I will be the least expensive author of the publishing house. I’ll spare you even my presence.

Elena Ferrante

One reason why fiction is a human necessity is that it satisfies many unconscious as well as conscious needs. It would be important if it only touched the conscious mind, as expository writing does. But fiction is important, too, because it teaches the unconscious.

Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

One realizes the immortality of true love only after the lover dies

Kanza Javed

And what is gossip anyway?Just fragments of sad accounts, maneuvered and mutilated year after year for our sinful pleasure.

Kanza Javed

Both tears and sweat are salty. but none of them are faulty. the tears can get you somewhere, the sweat will make you only wet.

Ana Claudia Antunes

While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem. (Dark City Lights)

S. J. Rozan

There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock.

Angela Carter

Paradoxically, however, a story ceases to be like life on its last page. Life goes on, but the story does not. Its characters have no vitality outside the first page and after the last is only good as the next reader's.

Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there.

Angela Carter

great literature is literature that speaks to deep, fundamental human truths and experience in a way that is relatable to the reader and that may provoke engagement or facilitate insight into these truths and experiences. If these truths and experiences are about breaches of the normal, then surely horror has a place in literature, and in facts may proffer deep engagement with the most profound aspects of our existence. Sometimes only horror can say what needs to be said.

Jacob M. Held

As insane as his request sounded to her, the fact that he already saw her nakedness the day before made her calm down a little. “He even covered my nakedness and gifted me with a beautiful dress,” she thought to herself. He held her hand and led her to the Nile river’s shore. He let go and stood back watching her.

Mirette Baghat

Christopher's heart bled that night and he could not sleep. Deborah who used to call him numerous times in a day and send countless messages was now not answering his calls. And she never called him.

Ayibu Makolo

Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.

James Wood

The problem was not an issue of availability because there were African girls everywhere. Christopher met them in church, in bars and in the cafeteria on the ground floor of the Sir Duncan Rice library.

Ayibu Makolo

The feeling, all encompassing, safe and warm like a blanket permanently draped over her shoulders, follows her around. She takes it into the shower, to meals with her mother and sister, to work as she reads out the news script, her voice never faltering.

Zainab Omaki

I wake up and look at that bridge, try to count the red taillights I see heading east every morning, a kind of rosary as I pray for another crisis to dwarf the one defining us right now.

K.I. Hope

The first time Kiya met Hapi was over a year ago. On that day, she was at the temple - not to sell pigeons and bread as usual, but to pray and offer sacrifices on the altar of Horus - the God of protection.

Mirette Baghat

He knelt down beside her and slowly rubbed a soft, muculent mix on her bare skin like a sculptor at work. It carried the pleasurable smell of wet earth. With his fingertips, he gently stroked every part of her body; and with every stroke, she groaned softly. She felt the pain that filled every bone in her body, yet she also felt the immense sensation of pleasure and comfort that was so foreign to her

Mirette Baghat

The small Chinese man sank onto the plush leather sofa. He sank so low on the large brown sofa, it looked like it would swallow him whole. He sat, clutching his briefcase close to his chest, his alert eyes scanning the spacious room. Opposite him, across a glass table sat a large African Minister in a freshly pressed Italian suit.

Marko Phiri

Yet Nathan appreciated being alone as he sipped his cold glass of beer. It gave him time to think. In the next thirty minutes or so, the flight he was waiting for would land and his day would begin. It was autumn in the capital, and the clear skies created an illusion of a city that was at peace with itself.

Marko Phiri

As Zhao ducked, he sneaked a blow aimed at Homwe’s stomach. Homwe groaned in surprise and confusion – shocked at his opponent’s speed and strength. He quickly drew a handgun from under his jacket and hit Xi Zhao on the head, drawing blood from his skull.

Marko Phiri

There were things hiding inside of her I wasn’t equipped to see and this collapse ripped her open to me. I searched her cavities for symbols that would betray her true nature, but found nothing I could read, just a vast absence containing her poverty of morals. I should’ve known, the need for my presence in her life was never love, only a sluice of goodness she would let flood the gulley of her body when she needed to appear human.

K.I. Hope

I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices of things we eat or something? Ain't that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less?

Ernest Hemingway

Words, to me, are the same as an instrument is to a musician. I never know where this typewriter is going to take me until I begin. I never know what I'm feeling until I read over what I have written.

Tessa Emily Hall

We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.

Victor Hugo

What do you think about America?""Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.

Donna Tartt

Popular! In America, what else matters?

Joyce Carol Oates

Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.

David Malouf

Literature is a virus.

Corey Redekop

So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

Zora Neale Hurston

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

Martin Amis

What happens when two introverts collide? Do they dissolve completely in each other’s patience and silence, or do they break their glass shells and become new people?

Kanza Javed

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

Vladimir Nabokov

They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.

John Gardner

Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, wheras literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.

James Wood

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

Ralph Ellison

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

Orson Scott Card

No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

And that was the point of children, thought Caroline Meddey: to bind us to the earth and to the present, to distract us from death.

Amanda Coplin

A child's imagination can be found in the heart of a good book.

K. Lamb

Literature has the ability to open up a whole new world to children, but we need to have a share in helping them to find that door and open it with them. Let’s set the example and help to foster this love of reading in our little ones.

Carmela Dutra

Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.

Fernando Pessoa

Despite how lonely or broken down you might feel, we need you with us helping to make the world better, kinder and safer, especially for the little girls coming up.

Jennifer Elisabeth

If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.

Madeleine L'Engle

I believe that children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting. …It does not hurt them to read about good and evil, love and hate, life and death. Nor do I think they should read only about things that they understand. '…a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.' So should a child’s. For myself, I will never talk down to, or draw down to, children.(from the author's acceptance speech for the Caldecott award)

Barbara Cooney

Great literature makes a great life.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Previous 1 … 23 24 25 26 27 … 41 Next

Literature Quotes - Page 25

Related Topics