Literature Quotes - Page 26

I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you're reading something that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a TV program...All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won't remember it, and you'll be less likely to choose a book over [insert popular contemporary TV program] next time you have a choice.

Nick Hornby

You don't find the concept of illicit love at all engaging?”“The concept, maybe. But in literature? That's like ordering a glass of tap water at a bar.

Nenia Campbell

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.

Rabih Alameddine

literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed.

Henry Miller

The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).

Christopher Hitchens

Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as a metaphor for the fleeting, fantasy-ridden quality of actual human lives. It is we who are made of dreams, not just such figments of Shakespeare’s imagination as Ariel and Caliban. The cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of this earth are mere stage scenery after all.

Terry Eagleton

Ah youth, youth! That's what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.

Reif Larsen

Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

Thomas C. Foster

The characters act for reasons that they can’t control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it’s all just puppetry on the part of the writer.

Johnny Rich

Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation…

Northrop Frye

The one thing is fiction in a novel and the other thing is reality. With fiction you don't make a fuss - you can 'beat it' and there's never enough. At least in my opinion - cause there are people, who complain about style intensity in literature: they prefer cereals with milk than abyssinian bitches roasted alive on bringhausers and watered with ya-yoo juice.

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.

Marisha Pessl

Your passions don’t have to connect to one another and no one needs to sign off on them. Passion isn’t logical… it’s only the fuel which keeps our souls alive. Let it be that simple.

Jennifer Elisabeth

Writing is a holy occupation.

Lailah Gifty Akita

To read Shakespeare is to feel encompassed -- the plays contain practically every word I know, practically every character type I have ever met, and practically every idea I have ever had.

Kenji Yoshino

Don't starve an instinct with a lie on, Never hit or deceive a wounded lion. He heals faster than you can imagine And hurts even more when in famine.

Ana Claudia Antunes

These are my habits and the way I spend my life: studying literature.

Christine de Pizan

Every man needs his Siren To check his courage and strength When he hears her song In his travels through the unknown.

Dejan Stojanovic

Courage is more important than to be deceived by shallow victory waiting for a delayed defeat.

Dejan Stojanovic

It is very easy to love alone.

Gertrude Stein

If you're going to fall in love with anyone, fall in love with a writer. Allow yourself to become immortalised in words.

Jamie L. Harding

I am constantly torn between the will to be seen and still hidden so god damn well, a contradiction I never figured out.

Charlotte Eriksson

You don't know what it means to live the life that you could have lived, if an event over which you have no control, an unforeseeable circumstance, had not distracted and diverted you, and at times crushed you, as has happened to me.

Luigi Pirandello

...and here, in this if I always lose myself.

Luigi Pirandello

For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.

Yukio Mishima

Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.

James Joyce

I write so I don’t call you.

Jennifer Elisabeth

I see that you are heartlessly clever.For you know how to Love,but not Forever. You still return to me in flashes,so strong it clouds my Mind.The fire has turned to ashes,and yet, you’re not behind.

Meraaqi

I finally wentwhere everyone goesand I realizedI wasnevermissingout.

Meraaqi

Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.

Jane Austen

In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.

C.S. Lewis

When magic through nerves and reason passes, Imagination, force, and passion will thunder. The portrait of the world is changed.

Dejan Stojanovic

Arrival in the world is really a departure and that, which we call departure, is only a return.

Dejan Stojanovic

The world contained in a seed, Determined by its program.

Dejan Stojanovic

I enjoy it when the world smiles; the more smiles, the warmer I am.

Dejan Stojanovic

The world is a navy in an empty ocean.

Dejan Stojanovic

If an ancient man saw planes two thousand years ago He would've thought they were birds Or angels from another world Or messengers from other planets.

Dejan Stojanovic

This dwarf still observes the world from his own self-imposed height.

Dejan Stojanovic

The world is always open, Waiting to be discovered.

Dejan Stojanovic

My feelings are too loud for words and too shy for the world.

Dejan Stojanovic

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula K Le Guin

Pretense cannot sustain blind power.

Dejan Stojanovic

The fairy tale belongs to the poor...I know of no fairy tale which upholds the tyrant, or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairy tale is an absurdity.

Erik Christian Haugaard

When he is most powerful, nothing does he become.

Dejan Stojanovic

Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it.

Rafael Sabatini

Free time is a terrible thing to waste. Read a book.

E.A. Bucchianeri

No, Ben. What I’m asking is: Are you the vehicle, and Georgie rides around in you? That is why Ben’s the driver, right?

Jonathan Harnisch

Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world.

Pierre Janet

A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.

John Henry Newman

Friday night's alright for fightingSaturday, Sunday, Monday tooEvery night is a night of fightingWith family and friends like you

Jessica-Lynn Barbour

There is a voice in my head that is only silenced by the scratching of my pen

Jessica-Lynn Barbour

I'm sick of the images trapped in my headI'm sick of being preoccupied with the dead

Jessica-Lynn Barbour

literature is a way in which we can learn to live deeper lives -- husband with wife, parent with child, brother with sister, fellow member with fellow member. Most good authors are better than we are. They are much better company than our own friends. What comes from good company? What comes from good company is better manners, greater sensitivity, greater sensibility, greater empathy, great sympathy. Reading good literature makes us more capable of understanding other people, of loving other people, those whom we don't particularly want to love, even our enemies, as well as those closest to us. How can we expect to have full marriages when we are not going into those marriages with full minds and fine sensibilities? We are ignoring the tremendous possibilities of a delicate, well-poised, rich, sensitive life if we ignore the literature of the past. There is no substitute.

Arthur Henry King

I think people should take mythology much more seriously, because it tells us an awful lot about the history of the human race. We tend to dismiss it as 'fairy tales,' when it isn't. Fairy tales in themselves are about fundamentals of human nature. And they keep being reinvented in different ways. Fantasy acknowledges that, whereas a lot of modern literature is trying to distance itself from 'story,' never mind anything else. Which is why a lot of books are read by the critics, then people buy them, put them on their shelves, and don't really read them much, because they're not very interesting!

Jan Siegel

A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.

Ursula K Le Guin

What is fantasy? On one level, of course, it is a game: a pure pretense with no ulterior motive whatever. It is one child saying to another child, “Let’s be dragons,” and then they’re dragons for an hour or two. It is escapism of the most admirable kind—the game played for the game’s sake. On another level, it is still a game, but a game played for very high stakes. Seen thus, as art, not spontaneous play, its affinity is not with daydream, but with dream. It is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary, not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes, which, Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously.

Ursula K Le Guin

Happily-ever-after monogamy has been reinforced so steadily in literature that we tend to feel like failures when we don’t achieve that in reality.

Colleen Chen

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.

Ursula K Le Guin

A bad conscience makes a very good ghost.

Hope Mirrlees

Previous 1 … 24 25 26 27 28 … 41 Next

Literature Quotes - Page 26

Related Topics