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Literature Quotes
"Sad stories make good books."
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"When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all."
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"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."
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"Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it."
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"Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they?"
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"What kind of life can you have in a house without books?"
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"Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time."
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"Grayson: Fiction is just a lie anyway.Brianna: But it's not - it's a different kind of truth - it would be your truth at the time of the writing, wouldn't it?"
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"Falling short of perfection is a process that just never stops."
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"Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
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"I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature."
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"I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another."
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"Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature- at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes- is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune."
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"Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerales."
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"The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order."
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"Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told."
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"The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility."
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"Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without."
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"I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there wil always be a place for them."
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"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature."
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"I've always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there."
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"Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity."
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"American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter."
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"Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks."
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"Dialogues must appear as natural as if coming from effortless writing. It must not sweat. Your beloved readers must not sweat. But here am I, literally sweating, because my characters are literally talking dirty in a steamy sweaty and bloody scene."
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"I read, therefore I'm interested in writers."
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"What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past."
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"I am made of words. When you cut me, I bleed sentences. When you read me, I speak to your soul."
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"Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up."
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"You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God."
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"When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced."
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"Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither."
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"When you're 14, anything with a sword and a dragon is pretty cool. But when you're 21 and you've read 2,000 fantasy novels, you start to realize that some of those books, well, they weren't really good. OK, let's be honest. A lot of them were crap."
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Idiot, prends cette danse ardente, au lieu de tendre ton bâton.
J'en ai des raisons de voyager encore sur la mer infinie : j'ai perdu l'amour et j'ai bu ma bourse.
Ma belle m'a quitté, j'ai ses haillons pour m'abriter.
Mes gants de vieillard cachent les mains d'un fameux assassin !"
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"Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?"
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"Don't ask to live in tranquil times. Literature doesn't grow there."
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"Did it matter? George thought perhaps it did, and not in terms of finding truth or of any hope of discovering what really happened at any given moment. There were as many truths - overlapping, stewed together - as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew."
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"The Mole had long wanted to make the I acquaintance of the Badger. He seemed, by all accounts, to be such an important personage and, though rarely visible, to make his unseen influence felt by everybody about the place."
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"To call that writing, madam, is an insult to quills and ink across the world."
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"I love the smell of book ink in the morning."
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"Books! tis a dull and endless strife:Come, hear the woodland linnet,How sweet his music! on my life,There's more of wisdom in it."
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"I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up."
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"Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile."
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"Writers say many true things about their own experiences with publicity and promotion."
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"He seemed to hasten the retreat of departing light by his very presence; the setting sun dipped sharply, as though fleeing before our nigger; a black mist emanated from him; a subtle and dismal influence; a something cold and gloomy that floated out and settled on all the faces like a mourning veil. The circle broke up. The joy of laughter died on stiffened lips."
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"I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans."
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"You didn't understand the poem, but that was because it wasn't for you. It was for me to understand the pain you put me through."
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"Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron, Sebastian said approvingly. "Excellent choice."You have read this? Alexei asked."It's not as good as Miss Davenport and the Dark Marquis, of course, but worlds better than Miss Sainsbury and the Mysterious Colonel.Harry found himself rendered speechless."I'm reading Miss Truesdale and the Silent Gentleman right now."Silent? Harry echoed."There is a noticeable lack of dialogue, Sebastian confirmed."
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"And literature frequently rises to heights that make it international."
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