Literature Quotes - Page 3

Sappho isn't really meant to be read. It's meant to be sung and there were dances for the songs, also. Sappho was a performance artist, and now she exists as a textual project. She was saved by her critics, and by people who wrote of her in letters to each other. As the morning sun lathers the pool through the long windows and stripes the opposite walls in gold, I look at the fragment translations. She's paper, too. A paper poet for a paper boy. People claim to be translating her but they don't, really, they use her to write poems from as they fill in the gaps in the fragments. A duet. She may have meant for these to be solos but they're duets now, though the second singer blends in with the first. The first singer in this case is offstage, like in the old days of stars who couldn't sing, a real singer hidden behind a curtain, which is the velvet drape of history.

Alexander Chee

Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.

Christopher Hitchens

To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light.

Dejan Stojanovic

To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow.

Criss Jami

The day arrived,when myriad teary rivers flow and the muted wind faintly died in his tears—an altar for the beloved one's departure,for sister-hood is no more,for her to adore!while pangs the beating world in a lamenting voice;their remembering loss of the 'one' they embrace most and when the crepuscule came like a phantom,the mournful,gathered birds swiftly flew in gloom.

Nithin Purple

Pull back the curtain and jump down the rabbit hole.

Brad Jensen

Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.

Brad Jensen

History will be erased in the universal purgatory.

Dejan Stojanovic

She was born under the sign of Gemini. And that stands for the good and evil twin. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both hiding and residing inside her heart. Her good twin was not bad at all. But her evil twin was even better, and showed up to be way too fatal!

Ana Claudia Antunes

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

Cliches are the viruses that infect your writing with diseases.

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

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

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

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

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

Don DeLillo

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

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

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

Dejan Stojanovic

Literature will save me it's the only certainty i am sure of.

Nikki Rowe

The longest piece of literature I've read lately was a tattoo on this biker I picked up last night. It said, If you're this close, you've gotta suck it.

Eric Arvin

In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of the formation of a language, seeking the hidden reason of all its apparent caprices, we do not reach that end, for grammar is not literature… When we come to literature, we find that, though it conforms to the rules of grammar, it is yet a thing of joy; it is freedom itself. The beauty of a poem is bound by strict laws, yet it transcends them. The laws are its wings. They do not keep it weighed down. They carry it to freedom. Its form is in law, but its spirit is in beauty. Law is the first step toward freedom, and beauty is the complete liberation which stands on the pedestal of law. Beauty harmonizes in itself the limit and the beyond – the law and the liberty.

Rabindranath Tagore

أَعيشُ عَلى فُتاتِ أَحْلامٍI live on remnants of dreams

Khaled Ibrahim

In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his hip, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble, distant only twenty miles on a railroad. In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford.

Elizabeth Gaskell

When we are preoccupied with wealth and material acquisitions, it chokes God's word in us and makes it unfruitful. But if we follow His plan of being prosperous you will enjoy the blessings of this life.

Patience Johnson

The world is full of problems and I bet you the problems will continue to exist but what will make you relevant to the world is when you have answers to the questions the world asks. You can only be useful when you have the answers to the questions of the world. The best way you provide solutions and answers to those challenges is through wisdom.

Patience Johnson

You cannot have a dream and expect someone else's faith to make it a reality for you. Habakuk 2:4

Patience Johnson

A man with wisdom will always have a solution no matter how big his challenges may be. Wisdom makes you a problem solver.

Patience Johnson

If you want to see the beauty of any fish, throw it into the water, you will see how best it can swim because that is its source. Do you want to see the beauty in you? Don't look in the mirror, don't put on makeups, no jewelleries or expensive designer clothes, just go back and reconnect to your source and I bet, the best of you will show up. Until you return back to God, your best won't come out because He is your source.

Patience Johnson

Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent,more perfect than all that a man can invent.

Roman Payne

Ô, the wine of a womanfrom heaven is sent, more perfect than allthat a man can invent.When she came to my bed and begged me with sighsnot to tempt her towards passion nor actions unwise, tI told her I’d spare her and kissed her closed eyes, then unbraided her body of its clothing disguise.While our bodies were nude bathed in candlelight fineI devoured her mouth, tender lips divine;and I drank through her thighs her feminine wine.Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent,more perfect than all that a man can invent.

Roman Payne

Poetry empowers the simplest of lives to confront the most extreme sorrows with courage, and motivates the mightiest of offices to humbly heed lessons in compassion.

Aberjhani

I only wrote prose before I met you. My musings were superfluous and serious as well. But now the words dance with me. I sing with them and we create poetry.

Kamand Kojouri

This is a woman who didn’t want her viewpoints challenged, nor to see the views of the half of the world that comprises men. Her assumption is that all male authors are sexist and that their books distort the views of women....that’s bigoted and despicable: the form of feminism that sees men as the enemy from the outset, and seeks to reinforce that prejudice by reading only books that keep her in her safe space.....The future, in both life and books, is men and women together, with a mutual understanding that can come only from learning about each other’s thoughts. [About Caitlin Moran's sexist statement that girls shouldn't read any books written by men.]

Jerry Coyne

In your hands winteris a book with cloud pagesthat snow pearls of love.

Aberjhani

I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets.

Roman Payne

It was like hiking into a Hemingway story everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext.

Leslie What

You can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry.

E.A. Bucchianeri

You can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry.

E.A. Bucchianeri

There is only as much space, only as much time, Only as much desire, only as many words, Only as many pages, only as much ink To accept all of us at light-speed Hurrying into the Promised Land Of oblivion that is waiting for us sooner or later.

Dejan Stojanovic

Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time.

Dejan Stojanovic

English is the language through which I reach hearts from various corners of the world. English is the language through which I flirt with my species. English is the language through which I make my species think.

Abhijit Naskar

Life is a book. We write in everyday existence.

Lailah Gifty Akita

There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.

Harold Bloom

Watch movies. Read screenplays. Let them be your guide. […] Yes, McKee has been able to break down how the popular screenplay has worked. He has identified key qualities that many commercially successful screenplays share, he has codified a language that has been adopted by creative executives in both film and television. So there might be something of tangible value to be gained by interacting with his material, either in book form or at one of the seminars.But for someone who wants to be an artist, a creator, an architect of an original vision, the best book to read on screenwriting is no book on screenwriting. The best seminar is no seminar at all.To me, the writer wants to get as many outside voices OUT of his/her head as possible. Experts win by getting us to be dependent on their view of the world. They win when they get to frame the discussion, when they get to tell you there’s a right way and a wrong way to think about the game, whatever the game is. Because that makes you dependent on them. If they have the secret rules, then you need them if you want toget ahead.The truth is, you do

Brian Koppelman

You mark and celebrate errors, transforming failures into successes.

Dejan Stojanovic

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A library is more precious than a bank.

Abhijit Naskar

Total knowledge is annihilation Of the desire to see, to touch, to feel The world sensed only through senses And immune to the knowledge without feeling.

Dejan Stojanovic

Even if we try to conform to ideals and strive for perfection, we will always be pulled back to our core identity because it’s the path of least resistance for our souls – an energy force that wants nothing more than for us to honor and accept who we are and discover what we’re meant to do in the world.

Jennifer Elisabeth

This is your life – not your parents’, teachers’ or significant other’s. If you ever find yourself on a path that just doesn’t feel safe anymore, you have every right to stop the car, get out – change your shoes and start walking.

Jennifer Elisabeth

Starting over can be the scariest thing in the entire world, whether it’s leaving a lover, a school, a team, a friend or anything else that feels like a core part of our identity but when your gut is telling you that something here isn’t right or feels unsafe, I really want you to listen and trust in that voice.

Jennifer Elisabeth

The ‘Muse’ is not an artistic mystery, but a mathematical equation. The gift are those ideas you think of as you drift to sleep. The giver is that one you think of when you first awake.

Roman Payne

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.

H.G.Wells

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

Aberjhani

All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight against it, it inhabits them, it is their familiar and their succubus. Why write, if everything has, in a way, already been said? Gide observed sardonically that since nobody listened, everything has to be said again, yet a suspicion of guilt and superfluity leads the European intellectual to the most extreme refinements of his trade and tools, the only way to avoid paths too much traveled. Thus the enthusiasm that greets novelties, the uproar when a writer has succeeded in giving substance to a new slice of the invisible; merely recall symbolism, surrealism, the ‘nouveau roman’: finally something truly new that neither Ronsard, nor Stendahl , nor Proust imagined. For a moment we can put aside our guilt; even the epigones begin too believe they are doing something new. Afterwards, slowly, they begin to feel European again and each writer still has his albatross around his neck.

Julio Cortázar

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Literature Quotes - Page 3

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