Literature Quotes - Page 28

Tempestuous plains tell the tale,Windswept wastes do bewail,Haunting Spirit of the land,Seeks the living, seeks the damned.Horizoned edge sheared with grass,tttDark Storm Rising in the pass,Ageless Spirit seeks the path,To torment souls to the last.Brooding Spirit upon the plain,Thunderhead gathers for the rain.ttttLight grows dim then bolts with pain,On dry Earth her sin is stained.(Frightened creatures do stampede,Into night, they do recede).Ungodded hand on seasoned blade,Reaps the harvest of the Age.Released from her eternal din,Spirit of the Age rises again.Seeking to plunder and consume,ttThose who were proud, those who presumed.Spirits rage while storm draws nigh,Upon burning plain and emblazoned sky.It is said giants grapple in the Earth so deep,To contend for souls that they might keep.ttThe Storm spirit now searches the high and the low,To seek her manchild victim in the fields below.Leaves bad wasteland to claim but a fallen man,Denying it Heaven, crowning it, ‘Son of the Damned.’Treacherous Spirit of the far lost night,tttTramples souls down denying them light.Storm seethes with furious hiss,Leads men on to bottomless pit.This most ancient of foes has come from her den,To seek the living, to make ready those dead.tA living sacrifice is her soul desire,To snatch the soul for black funeral pyre.A double-damned devil, that is she,This one who lies, who claims to make free.A lying spirit, that is her domain,tttttA storm-wracked Fury of self-proclaim.Onward she seeks, this bleak Northern wind,Searching for naught but for a soul akin.Amidst the howling and the rage,To murder again, that is her trade.ttttAs this spirit of graves left the plain,She left a wake of dead in shrouded train.tttNow down from the plain Storm did come,Unto those cities wherein was no sun.There with whirlwind she did rip and scour,ttFor those souls of whom she could tear and devour.She comes to seek the living and the dead,Those who were frightened, those with no dread.Thus upon those she did acclaim,“I am the Mistress of the living and the slain.”ttO’ haunting Spirit of this land,Taker of life, maker of the damned. --On Villainess Storm, Ch. One Valley of the Damned
douglas m laurent
Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or necessity; and restricted within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and those whom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, only momentarily and partially open... there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation; — talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting around us all day long, — kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain it! — in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make no account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all day long!
John Ruskin
Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.
Italo Calvino
If e-book readers were invented before print books, (petty things such as) the smell of ink would have been some people’s only reason for not abandoning e-books.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all.
Alice Walker
We sometimes reveal how ignorant or bored we were when we read a book by giving it 5-stars.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
at home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
Lisel Mueller
Give her books, where other people did all the running around and courting; it was far easier to read about such matters than to experience them herself.
Sophie Dash
The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men
Fernando Pessoa
Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years--about twelve of them--to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted brain to take. Some of the parts must be sculpted at critical times. One cannot, after all, carve out toes unless he knows where the foot will go. We need tools to do some of the fine work. The tools are our childhood experiences. And I'm convinced that one of those experiences must be children's books. And they must be experienced within the early years of our long childhood.
E.L. Konigsburg
I always find that after reading books written by Jane Austen that I speak much more properly, at least for a while.
Becky Watson
The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man’s frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
Max Lerner
If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture.
Edith Wharton
The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I’ve had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.
Pat Conroy
I don’t know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.
Pat Conroy
We all act as independent learners in charge of designing our autodidactic curricula. Reading the books written by the prophetic genius of history including the literary masterpieces and philosophical treatises awakens the mind. Reading can act as a gateway drug leading to writing and expansion of a personal state of conscious awareness.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Literature provides a person with a conceptual framework for recognizing human beings recurrent challenges in life. Reading good literature deepens a person’s understanding of the variable ways that somebody might respond to circumstances in their world, thereby adding to their own potential intellectual and spiritual depth and expands their understanding of the nuances of their own personal behavior.
Kilroy J. Oldster
Whatever it is that you're feeling, whatever it is you have a question about, whatever it is that you long to know, there is some book, somewhere, with the key. You just have to search for it.
Adriana Trigiani
School children, who have enjoyed reading a romance or a detective thriller or a novel about terror and conquest, make the invariable mistake of studying literature in the college. They make the mistake of learning theory in place of art; they acquire impediments in their own enjoyment of the books by allowing a set of theories to govern their own reading.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette Winterson
Sitting in the brightly lit library, surrounded by books, in total silence, that was ma personal zenith.
Irvine Welsh
Literature is map of humanity, the documenter of civilization. Books introduce us to the landscape of the greatest minds of every century.
Kilroy J. Oldster
That's the most important thing. If I keep reading, maybe I can hold my own.
Daniel Keyes
But why," he said with animation, "do the English not read their own great literature?"Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, "Because at school they are made to hate it.
Olaf Stapledon
Reading books makes us more attentive to our personage and the aesthetic world that we live in. Writers that we idolize use language, logic, and nuance to paint physical and emotional scenes with refined precision. A writer’s use of vivid language creates lingering aftereffects that work their wonder on the reader’s malleable mind. A stirred mind resurrects our semiconscious memories; it causes us to summon up enduring images of our family, friends, and acquaintances. Just as importantly, inspirational writing makes us recognize our own telling character traits and identify our formerly unexpressed thoughts and feelings.
Kilroy J. Oldster
I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.
Nikita Gill
If rewriting equals rereading, we must logically conclude that writing is reading. If this is indeed the case, how could we possibly write under a ban on reading? The only way left is mouth-to-mouth – poets and storytellers recite their pieces and before we can commit them to memory, everything vanishes into thin air.
Kyoko Yoshida
Don’t interrupt when your characters take a flight of their own.
Pawan Mishra
Cliches are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases.
Pawan Mishra
If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.
Pawan Mishra
If certain aspect needs to be inconsistent, it must better be consistently inconsistent throughout the story.
Pawan Mishra
If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.
Bret Easton Ellis
If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the reading of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.
Bret Easton Ellis
In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home.
Henry David Thoreau
A writer gets to live yet another life every time she creates a new story.
Pawan Mishra
Writing a story is like going on a date—you will spoil it if you aren't living in the moment.
Pawan Mishra
Tell a story in lesser and simpler words.
Pawan Mishra
Don’t break the rules when you haven’t fully figured them out yet.
Pawan Mishra
Dreams are good at playing with your memory. They love leaving no trace behind and hate to show up once again in the morning.
Pawan Mishra
The good writing ideas don’t have to be about political turmoil, mass killings, capitalism, racism, injustice, etc. Find that one idea that has deep roots in your heart.
Pawan Mishra
Create a world in front of your readers where they can taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and move. Else they are likely going to move on to another book.
Pawan Mishra
A writer can do without food for a few hours, but not without the sight of books.
Pawan Mishra
Turn those deep feelings and obsessions of your heart into captivating pieces of literature.
Pawan Mishra
Ideas either age like fine wine or rot like potatoes over time.
Pawan Mishra
If you are a singer, you must sing. If you are a dancer, you must dance. If you are a writer, you must write. Don’t suffocate your heart.
Pawan Mishra
As you become a better writer, the writing becomes more difficult. You toil harder to tell a story in a lesser number of words.
Pawan Mishra
Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in tow ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
Italo Calvino
I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.
Azar Nafisi
Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.
Thomas C. Foster
What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices? What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners?
Sergio Troncoso
If you will read and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being. It is literature and only literature than can do this.
Rick Gekoski
...begged them as we read our literary texts, only to listen. To wrench open - it takes an effort of will - the portcullis to their teenage hearts for just a couple of hours once a week, to humbly admit another, and better - a Yeats or Shakespeare, a Crazy Jane or Hamlet - and to welcome them, to allow for those tiny spots of time some vibration in the jelly of being, that makes, once it has settled, a subtle new mould... Otherwise, I would observe tartly...you are merely going to become a product of your family, the few friends you might make and the few lovers you may garner...nothing more than a function of your upbringing - a type. Whereas, if you will only read, and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being. It is literature and only literature than can do this.
Rick Gekoski
I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.
Don DeLillo
Literature for me was a magnificent destiny for which I was not yet fully prepared. 76
Anita Brookner
I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books--I’m talking about my friends and myself--went beyond love. It was as if we didn’t know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn’t simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.They showed us what was possible. We had been living with whatever was close at hand, whatever was given, and books took us great distances. We had known only domestic emotions and they showed us what happens to emotions when they are homeless. Books gave us balance--the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity.
Anatole Broyard
I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places.
Terry Pratchett
‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness.
F.R. Leavis
The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.
Harold Bloom
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.
M.H. Abrams

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