Literature Quotes

When you’re used to being in dangerous situations, you develop a sixth sense about your surroundings, about where possible enemies might be lurking, how many steps it will take to reach the next corner on a dead run, the best hiding places if bullets start to fly...

~ Mark Zero

Never run upstairs when someone’s chasing you. Don’t try to quick-draw a man who already has his gun out. Never light a match in the dark in a strange building. Half of staying safe is just keeping your head and being prudent.

~ Mark Zero

It wasn’t playing both sides of the fence – it was betting against yourself but still playing to win – and it encapsulated everything absurd and paradoxical that I loved about the French.

~ Mark Zero

And I had just kissed my ex-girlfriend, who had cried, while my current girlfriend was in jail. So far, it had not been my best day.

~ Mark Zero

I congratulate you on your success stealing the painting.

~ Mark Zero

In all ages woman has been the source of all that is pure, unselfish, and heroic in the spirit and life of man.....poetry and fiction are based upon woman's love, and the movements of history are mainly due to the sentiments or ambitions she has inspired......there is no aspiration which any man here to-night entertains, no achievement he seeks to accomplish, no great and honorable ambition he desires to gratify, which is not directly related to either or both a mother or a wife. From the hearth-stone around which linger the recollections of our mother, from the fireside where our wife awaits us, come all the purity, all the hope, and all the courage with which we fight the battle of life. The man who is not thus inspired, who labors not so much to secure the applause of the world as the solid and more precious approval of his home, accomplishes little of good for others or of honor for himself. I close with the hope that each of us may always have near us: 'A perfect woman, nobly planned,To warn, to comfort, and command,And yet a spirit still, and brightWith something of an angel light.

~ Chauncey Mitchell Depew

This was a crime of passion, but unlike most crimes of passion, it had been meticulously and diabolically well-planned.

~ Mark Zero

Bergé’s yelling had attracted the attention of everyone in the Kibati hall: champagne flutes stopped halfway to heavily painted lips, eyes widened, massive diamonds groaned scornfully in their settings. It was a stationary riot.

~ Mark Zero

All the great novels are about obsession and people who are obsessed.

~ Marty Rubin

Like the 'good' characters in literature, the sane don't have any memorable lines.

~ Adam Phillips Going Sane

That's sounds right. Another $5,000 went to dress up the Little League park where he had played so many games. Seems like he paid off the MORTAGE on his parents' home, which wasn't that much.

~ John Grisham

Fiction though it is a fiction, should be written in a way that it feels like a reality, a reality every reader willingly or sometimes unwillingly goes through, until the reader finishes reading and sometimes even after that.

~ Arti Honrao

...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.

~ Virginia Woolf

My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings.

~ Mario Vargas Llosa

Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

~ Sara Sheridan

Ô, wine!, the truth-serum so potent that all those who wish to live happy lives should abstain from drinking it entirely!... except of course when they are alone.

~ Roman Payne

You will come across people who always affirm by everything you say, but at the hour of need, they simply disappear! Stay away from such people or simply don't fall for their promises.

~ K. Hari Kumar

A story has to break your heart or it's not worth telling.

~ Marty Rubin

..home INSIDE is home shining brightly above all homes in physical world.

~ Christina Westover

Energy manipulation took place completely in mind,same way believing in telepathy caused telepathic abilities to grow STRONGER.

~ Christina Westover

Defining moment in new telepathist's life, moment when intuitive individual learns most of society isn't telepathic, doesn't see auras,doesn't know what life on ethereal astral plane is like.

~ Christina Westover

Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.

~ George Albert Wells

It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are.

~ Alasdair Macintyre

I am gone tomorrow. And there and gone again by the time you read this.

~ Salvador Plascencia

A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth.

~ Declan Kiberd

He pries me from his chest and drops his hand from the back of my head, tracing my ear, along my jawline. He snatches his fingers a moment before they press into my lip.

~ Rebecca Berto

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh.

~ David Foster Wallace

Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and it is the lover's privilege.

~ J.m. Barrie

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

~ Flannery O'connor

The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.

~ Oakley Hall

Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.(Southey's reply to Charlotte Bronte)

~ Robert Southey

I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.

~ Bell Hooks

If improving conditions in the workplace for women had been a central agenda for feminist movement in conjunction with efforts to obtain better paying jobs for women and finding jobs for unemployed women of all classes, feminism would have been seen as a movement addressing the concerns of all women.

~ Bell Hooks

Critical interventions around race did not destroy the women's movement; it became stronger . . . It shows us that no matter how misguided feminist thinkers have been in the past, the will to change, the will to create the context for struggle and liberation, remains stronger than the need to hold on to wrong beliefs and assumptions.

~ Bell Hooks

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.

~ Zora Neale Hurston

Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name--and therefore live--afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.

~ Adrienne Rich

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

~ Marcel Proust

Who is the most worthy of admiration, musician or audience?Probably the musician will tell that his audience and the musician that his audience

~ Válgame