If an ancient man saw planes two thousand years ago He would've thought they were birds Or angels from another world Or messengers from other planets.
~ Dejan Stojanovic
The world is a fairy tale, we are its guardians.
When magic through nerves and reason passes, Imagination, force, and passion will thunder. The portrait of the world is changed.
Arrival in the world is really a departure and that, which we call departure, is only a return.
The world contained in a seed, Determined by its program.
In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.
~ C.s. Lewis
Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.
~ Jane Austen
I see that you are heartlessly clever.For you know how to Love,but not Forever. You still return to me in flashes,so strong it clouds my Mind.The fire has turned to ashes,and yet, you’re not behind.
~ Meraaqi
I finally wentwhere everyone goesand I realizedI wasnevermissingout.
I write so I don’t call you.
~ Jennifer Elisabeth
Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.
~ James Joyce
For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.
~ Yukio Mishima
You don't know what it means to live the life that you could have lived, if an event over which you have no control, an unforeseeable circumstance, had not distracted and diverted you, and at times crushed you, as has happened to me.
~ Luigi Pirandello
...and here, in this if I always lose myself.
I am constantly torn between the will to be seen and still hidden so god damn well, a contradiction I never figured out.
~ Charlotte Eriksson
If you're going to fall in love with anyone, fall in love with a writer. Allow yourself to become immortalised in words.
~ Jamie L. Harding
It is very easy to love alone.
~ Gertrude Stein
Courage is more important than to be deceived by shallow victory waiting for a delayed defeat.
Every man needs his Siren To check his courage and strength When he hears her song In his travels through the unknown.
These are my habits and the way I spend my life: studying literature.
~ Christine De Pizan
Don't starve an instinct with a lie on, Never hit or deceive a wounded lion. He heals faster than you can imagine And hurts even more when in famine.
~ Ana Claudia Antunes
To read Shakespeare is to feel encompassed -- the plays contain practically every word I know, practically every character type I have ever met, and practically every idea I have ever had.
~ Kenji Yoshino
Writing is a holy occupation.
~ Lailah Gifty Akita
Your passions don’t have to connect to one another and no one needs to sign off on them. Passion isn’t logical… it’s only the fuel which keeps our souls alive. Let it be that simple.
A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.
~ Marisha Pessl
The one thing is fiction in a novel and the other thing is reality. With fiction you don't make a fuss - you can 'beat it' and there's never enough. At least in my opinion - cause there are people, who complain about style intensity in literature: they prefer cereals with milk than abyssinian bitches roasted alive on bringhausers and watered with ya-yoo juice.
~ Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation…
~ Northrop Frye
The characters act for reasons that they can’t control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it’s all just puppetry on the part of the writer.
~ Johnny Rich
Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.
~ Thomas C. Foster
This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.
~ Reif Larsen
Ah youth, youth! That's what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as a metaphor for the fleeting, fantasy-ridden quality of actual human lives. It is we who are made of dreams, not just such figments of Shakespeare’s imagination as Ariel and Caliban. The cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of this earth are mere stage scenery after all.
~ Terry Eagleton
The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness).
~ Christopher Hitchens
literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed.
~ Henry Miller
Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.
~ Rabih Alameddine
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.
~ Nenia Campbell
I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. But please, if you're reading something that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a TV program...All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won't remember it, and you'll be less likely to choose a book over [insert popular contemporary TV program] next time you have a choice.
~ Nick Hornby
I believe that children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting. …It does not hurt them to read about good and evil, love and hate, life and death. Nor do I think they should read only about things that they understand. '…a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.' So should a child’s. For myself, I will never talk down to, or draw down to, children.(from the author's acceptance speech for the Caldecott award)
~ Barbara Cooney
If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.
~ Madeleine L'engle
Despite how lonely or broken down you might feel, we need you with us helping to make the world better, kinder and safer, especially for the little girls coming up.
