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Literature Quotes
"The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose."
7
"He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else."
7
"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."
7
"Any time a beloved character is killed off, it affects the audience in a very powerful way, especially in a series."
7
"Shelby watched the books burn. She wonders if words are pouring down on other people's houses,sad words, like beast and mourn and sorrow and mother."
7
"Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written, I'd rather boast about the ones I've read."
6
"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."
6
"A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it."
6
"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."
6
"Anybody can make history, only a great man can write it."
6
"The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead."
6
"What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is."
6
"And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating, "'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door- Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;- This it is, and nothing more."
6
"Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood."
6
"When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape " into different countries, mores, speech patterns " but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic."
6
"For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die."
6
"It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free."
6
"If you ask 20 different readers why they read, they will all be right."
6
"I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast."
6
"Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn't this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn't it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?"
6
"When a writer dies, he becomes his books."
6
"We don't read to observe the character from a distance. We read to become the character and experience the conflicts and rewards they are experiencing."
6
"We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth,We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.God help us, for we knew the worst too young!from "Gentleman Rankers."
6
"And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe."
6
"Some books sold because they are (said to be) great. Some are (said to be) great because they sold."
6
"This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again."
5
"The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."
5
"If you would be a reader read if a writer write."
5
"Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards, their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble, the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."
5
"Jesus--if Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good."
5
"There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dA©nouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display."
5
"You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal."
5
"Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it."
5
"I believe that we should only read those books that bite and sting us. If a book does not rouse us with a blow then why read it?"
5
"We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too."
5
"This beast went to the well and drank, and the noise was in the beast's belly like unto the questing of thirty couple hounds, but all the while the beast drank there was no noise in the beast's belly."
5
"Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. "I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind."
5
"Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating."
5
"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "science fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."
5
"The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences."
5
"The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste."
5
"Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved."
5
"Deep versed in books and shallow in himself."
5
"What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?"
5
"And all who told it added something new And all who heard it made enlargements too."
5
"The pages aren't numbered, so I don't know whether I have the beginning or end or whether it's in sequence but these days I'm not really looking for continuity.All I'm after is something that makes sense to me."
5
"There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be."
5
"A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures."
5
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