Literature Quotes

Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.

~ Fernando Pessoa

Literature has the ability to open up a whole new world to children, but we need to have a share in helping them to find that door and open it with them. Let’s set the example and help to foster this love of reading in our little ones.

~ Carmela Dutra

A child's imagination can be found in the heart of a good book.

~ K. Lamb

No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.

~ Edgar Rice Burroughs

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

~ Ralph Ellison

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

~ Orson Scott Card

They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.

~ John Gardner

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

~ Martin Amis

What happens when two introverts collide? Do they dissolve completely in each other’s patience and silence, or do they break their glass shells and become new people?

~ Kanza Javed

So Janie waited a bloom time, and a green time and an orange time. But when the pollen again gilded the sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed. She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making. The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off. She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

~ Zora Neale Hurston

Literature is a virus.

~ Corey Redekop

The truth is that we all live by leaving behind, no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.

~ David Malouf

Popular! In America, what else matters?

~ Joyce Carol Oates

What do you think about America?Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.

~ Donna Tartt

We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.

~ Victor Hugo

I had try to tell the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it, as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know.

~ Ernest Hemingway

I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices of things we eat or something? Ain't that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less?

~ Ernest Hemingway

Words, to me, are the same as an instrument is to a musician. I never know where this typewriter is going to take me until I begin. I never know what I'm feeling until I read over what I have written.

~ Tessa Emily Hall

There were things hiding inside of her I wasn’t equipped to see and this collapse ripped her open to me. I searched her cavities for symbols that would betray her true nature, but found nothing I could read, just a vast absence containing her poverty of morals. I should’ve known, the need for my presence in her life was never love, only a sluice of goodness she would let flood the gulley of her body when she needed to appear human.

~ K.i. Hope

I wake up and look at that bridge, try to count the red taillights I see heading east every morning, a kind of rosary as I pray for another crisis to dwarf the one defining us right now.

~ K.i. Hope

The first time Kiya met Hapi was over a year ago. On that day, she was at the temple - not to sell pigeons and bread as usual, but to pray and offer sacrifices on the altar of Horus - the God of protection.

~ Mirette Baghat

He knelt down beside her and slowly rubbed a soft, muculent mix on her bare skin like a sculptor at work. It carried the pleasurable smell of wet earth. With his fingertips, he gently stroked every part of her body; and with every stroke, she groaned softly. She felt the pain that filled every bone in her body, yet she also felt the immense sensation of pleasure and comfort that was so foreign to her

~ Mirette Baghat

The small Chinese man sank onto the plush leather sofa. He sank so low on the large brown sofa, it looked like it would swallow him whole. He sat, clutching his briefcase close to his chest, his alert eyes scanning the spacious room. Opposite him, across a glass table sat a large African Minister in a freshly pressed Italian suit.

~ Marko Phiri

Yet Nathan appreciated being alone as he sipped his cold glass of beer. It gave him time to think. In the next thirty minutes or so, the flight he was waiting for would land and his day would begin. It was autumn in the capital, and the clear skies created an illusion of a city that was at peace with itself.

~ Marko Phiri

As Zhao ducked, he sneaked a blow aimed at Homwe’s stomach. Homwe groaned in surprise and confusion – shocked at his opponent’s speed and strength. He quickly drew a handgun from under his jacket and hit Xi Zhao on the head, drawing blood from his skull.

~ Marko Phiri

As insane as his request sounded to her, the fact that he already saw her nakedness the day before made her calm down a little. “He even covered my nakedness and gifted me with a beautiful dress,” she thought to herself. He held her hand and led her to the Nile river’s shore. He let go and stood back watching her.

~ Mirette Baghat

Christopher's heart bled that night and he could not sleep. Deborah who used to call him numerous times in a day and send countless messages was now not answering his calls. And she never called him.

~ Ayibu Makolo

Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.

~ James Wood

The problem was not an issue of availability because there were African girls everywhere. Christopher met them in church, in bars and in the cafeteria on the ground floor of the Sir Duncan Rice library.

~ Ayibu Makolo

The feeling, all encompassing, safe and warm like a blanket permanently draped over her shoulders, follows her around. She takes it into the shower, to meals with her mother and sister, to work as she reads out the news script, her voice never faltering.

~ Zainab Omaki

great literature is literature that speaks to deep, fundamental human truths and experience in a way that is relatable to the reader and that may provoke engagement or facilitate insight into these truths and experiences. If these truths and experiences are about breaches of the normal, then surely horror has a place in literature, and in facts may proffer deep engagement with the most profound aspects of our existence. Sometimes only horror can say what needs to be said.

~ Jacob M. Held

At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there.

~ Angela Carter

There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock.

~ Angela Carter

One realizes the immortality of true love only after the lover dies

~ Kanza Javed

And what is gossip anyway?Just fragments of sad accounts, maneuvered and mutilated year after year for our sinful pleasure.

~ Kanza Javed

Both tears and sweat are salty. but none of them are faulty. the tears can get you somewhere, the sweat will make you only wet.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t. . . . I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child. . . . True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known. . . . Besides, isn’t it true that promotion is expensive? I will be the least expensive author of the publishing house. I’ll spare you even my presence.

~ Elena Ferrante

I seek to take my audience on an emotional roller-coaster ride, a journey of laughter and tears and every sentiment in between.

~ Marc Royston

I steal a glance when no one is looking. Especially at his neck, when he turns to say something to my mother. That slender neck, with its air of determination, brisk and bold…

~ Anne Hébert