Literature Quotes - Page 29

To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don’t know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them up.For me, reading has always been not only a quest for pleasure and enlightenment but also a word-hunting expedition, a lexical safari.

Charles Harrington Elster

Give yourself to reading.’... You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works,especially the Puritanic writers, and expositions of the Bible.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.

Fernando Pessoa

In some literature, I’ve read, weather is used as a metaphor. The darker and stormier the weather outside the more diabolical the deeds done. When the clouds roll away, however, the rain has washed away all the blood in the streets and the world is clean and new again, as if all the violence and destruction of the storm served a divine purpose.

Benjamin R. Smith

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minority of the writers on my shelves who have struggled with words and thoughts and, by my lights, have lost the struggle. All together they are my community, the creators of the very idea of books, poetry, and extended narratives, and of the amazing human conversation that has taken place across the millennia, through weal and woe, over the heads of interest and utility.

Marilynne Robinson

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Margaret Atwood

The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.

Bruno Bettelheim

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.

Pat Conroy

People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused.

Jonathan Ames

A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle...

Vladimir Nabokov

That's why literature is so fascinating. It's always up for interpretation, and could be a hundred different things to a hundred different people. It's never the same thing twice.

Sara Raasch

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

Maya Angelou

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Fernando Pessoa

Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.

Tom Rachman

And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left-say we lost everything-we'd still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognised line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we've forgotten we even know it.

Ali Smith

Horror is the law of the world of living creatures, and civilization is concerned with masking that truth. Literature and art refine and beautify, and if they were to depict reality naked, just as everyone suspects it is (although we defend ourselves against that knowledge), no one would be able to stand it.

Czesław Miłosz

In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched by art, is a misshapen man. An incomplete man.

William Styron

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium

Oscar Wilde

As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, no painter ever stands before a completely blank canvas, no author ever sits before a blank page. In fact, the surface confronting the modern artist is full of inherited images that must first be cleared from the imagination before one can begin to create one's own.

Marie Luise Knott

In some way, every creative action disturbs the universe.

E.L. Konigsburg

Maybe stories choose how they are told and who tells them.

Kamand Kojouri

When we create, we become stronger. When we create, we feel better. When we create, we can use our own two hands to create a new world. And this new world will be as we want it to be.

Valentina Knurova

linear brains can't curve a thought.

douglas m laurent

And someday,when the partiesdon’t dazzle you anymore,and when the alcohol failsto amuse your senses,come to me.We’ll lie on the grass,stare at the stars,and talk about Life.Maybe I will become the Momentyou rediscover yourself again.

Meraaqi

It is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition. To serve up the lukewarm remains of yesterdays dinner is easy, profitable and popular, (for a while). It is also wrong.

Jeanette Winterson

Because at nightwhen others are sleeping, I drown myself in poetry.

Kamand Kojouri

...human beings are able to attend to issues longer, to think harder about them, to receive deeper impressions that last longer, if information is presented in a context of emotion--a sort of hot dressing--than if it is presented wholly without affect.

Mette Hjort

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

Kamand Kojouri

In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances

Virginia Woolf

It is a dangerous thing to substitute reading or writing for living. Live first, then write.

Kamand Kojouri

There is no revelation in my words. I am merely stating what others have forgotten to write down.

Kamand Kojouri

The notion of "cause and effect" is sometimes useful in real life, and it can even be interesting in art, but I'm more interested in "cause and cause" or "effect and effect" or "and and and".

kevin mcpherson eckhoff

There is so much in the world for us if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it ourselves- so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful for.

L.M. Montgomery

Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge. Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat. Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.

Kamand Kojouri

Be a good reader first, if you wish to become a good writer.

Pawan Mishra

The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.

Jeanette Winterson

Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.

J.M. Coetzee

The artist tries to show reason in experience and appearance – and lyric is the daily appearance, the commonplace dress, of reason. It shows us the rational. It makes the epic pattern human. It's the footprint on the pathway. In the epic-lyric the individual and particular are no longer isolated but are placed in a historical, social, human pattern. That's why there's a political way of cutting bread or wearing shoes.

Edward Bond

It was held that the six great arts – visual art (including architecture and photography), drama, dance, music, film and literature – form a family of related, if largely autonomous, practices: they all work through the aesthetic, all address the imagination, and all are concerned with the symbolic embodiment of human meaning.

Peter Abbs

There has never been any art or literature without drink and there never will be....Unless something is done about the matter [prohibition] this country is going to the dogs. There has been no development in our art or literature for 30 or 40 years.

Joseph Pennell

Art doesn’t give rise to anything in us that isn’t already there. It simply stirs our curious consciousness and sparks a fire that illuminates who we have always wanted to be.

Kamand Kojouri

Art is the medium through which new thoughts, perspectives, and attitudes are brought into the world.

James Rozoff

It's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it's also true that a word is worth a thousand pictures.

Marty Johncox

I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.

Iris Murdoch

We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.

Dejan Stojanovic

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

Dejan Stojanovic

The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.

Gustave Flaubert

WE ARE the PULSE of the TIMES!

Carrie White

Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs... And darkness winds between the characters.- Gormenghast

Mervyn Peake

In trying to be perfect, He perfected the art of anonymity, Became imperceptible And arrived nowhere from nowhere.

Dejan Stojanovic

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. ("The New Russian Prose")

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line.

Dejan Stojanovic

If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.

George Eliot

He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.

Julian Barnes

I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.

Roman Payne

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

Toni Morrison

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself. This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.

Fernando Pessoa

All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.

Roman Payne

Every soul that existed on earth is part of earth human history.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Previous 1 … 27 28 29 30 31 … 41 Next

Literature Quotes - Page 29

Related Topics