Literature Quotes

A constant discomfort derives from this--writing these sentences, or any other for that matter--I am writing an ad for the war. With that, every utterance about freedom finishes.

~ Semezdin Mehmedinović

There is the outside of a story, and the inside of a story... One is the fruit and may be delicious, but the other is the seed.

~ Alice Hoffman

Shakespeare's work had a liberating influence.

~ Paul C. Nagel

John Quincy Adams strove to escape commonplace thoughts.

~ Paul C. Nagel

Life is a book. We are writing the stories of our lives.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Rather than pound or a national mind that he believed had been closed by his critics, John Quincy Adams decided to seek a place in the is the esteem of future generations.

~ Paul C. Nagel

Good literature is a lifeboat! Every time you feel you are sinking, jump on it!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

A dessert to a deserter in the desert burst, You trust your thirst. And you are too hot! You scream for ice cream. And believe it or not, I may not be your first. But I might be your lust! Give it a shot...

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

Literature is life.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

A shadow archive and an archive of shadows, the literary architectonic demands a resistance to excessive illumination.

~ Akira Mizuta Lippit

... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

You want to go to a place where you never lose anything and you keep gaining many things? Go to the Land Of Literature where you gain new paths, new ideas, new lives, new goals, and new souls!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I do have a religion, it’s just not an ordinary one. In fact it is an extraordinary one. My religion is Literature.

~ Stephan Attia

You aren’t in the ivy halls of your miserable literature pursuit now. Without wasting more time, will thou cometh to the pointeth? Dost thou wanteth us to stayeth or leaveth?

~ Pawan Mishra

If you want to take pictures of Chinese food, you have to taste real Chinese food. The flavors soak into your tongue, go into your stomach. The stomach is where your true feelings are. And if you take photos, these true feelings from your stomach can come out, so that everyone can taste the food just by looking at your pictures.

~ Amy Tan

Much, maybe too much, has been written about literature.

~ Michel Houellebecq

My thoughts about pornography tend to revolve around the fact that while very few of us are zombies, detectives, cowboys, or spacemen, there are an infinite number of books that are recounting the stories of those lifestyles. However, all of us have some sort of feelings or opinions about sex. And yet the only art form which in any way is able to discuss sex, or depict sex, is this grubby despised under the counter art form, which has absolutely no standards. This was what Lost Girls was intended as a remedy for, that there is no reason why a horny piece of literature, that is purely about sex, could not be as beautiful, as meaningful, and have as absorbing characters as any other piece of fiction.

~ Alan Moore

Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression, they exist where a word has never intruded.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The literary experience extends impression into discourse. It flowers to thought with nouns, verbs, objects. It thinks. Film implodes discourse, it deliterates thought, it shrinks it to the compacted meaning of the preverbal impression or intuition or understanding. You receive what you see, you don't have to think it out. . . . Fiction goes everywhere, inside, outside, it stops, it goes, its action can be mental. Nor is it time-driven. Film is time-driven, it never ruminates, it shows the outside of life, it shows behavior. It tends to the simplest moral reasoning. Films out of Hollywood are linear. The narrative simplification of complex morally consequential reality is always the drift of a film inspired by a book. Novels can do anything in the dark horrors of consciousness. Films do close-ups, car drive-ups, places, chases and explosions.

~ E.l. Doctorow

I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I'm not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn't a popularity contest, it's not the moral Olympics, and it's not church. But it's Writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.

~ Stephen King

Young would-be novelists and poets believe that art is eternal. Au contraire: we are in the business of ephemera, the era of floating islands of trash, and most of the things we feel deeply and inscribe on the page will disappear.

~ Julie Schumacher

Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air--to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light.

~ Henry David Thoreau

And I, a twister, love, what I abhor.

~ John Wain

Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them…

~ Azar Nafisi

– I’m going to be a writer, he reminded Milo.– And you won’t need literature?– I’ll write my own.

~ Caleb Crain

Publishers are businesses and I don’t blame them for that. If they didn’t make money by publishing books, there wouldn’t be any books.

~ Johnny Rich

A good book is not the same as a successful one.

~ Johnny Rich

A novel must be judged on its merits, not on how hard the journey was to write it.

~ Johnny Rich

Those who lead a literary life seem old when they're young and young when they're old, but they're never actually either. Like a good book, they are bound by neither category nor time.

~ J.c. Hallman

Two girls walk past in gargantuan heels and dresses so tight that their skin is spilling out, and one of them says to the other, Wait, who the fuck is Lewis Carroll? and in my imagination I pull a gun out of my pocket, shoot them both and then shoot myself.

~ Alice Oseman

Your words... I hold them deeplike ancient skinshold wrinkles.

~ Sanober Khan

Novelists would do well to remember that when the works of the scholar-historians create doubt in the researcher’s mind, the researcher then turns to literature as a primary source for confirmation or correction. If the truth of a time, a people, a state is not available anywhere else, let it be in the novel. - from Twayne’s US Authors Series: JOHN A WILLIAMS by Gilbert Muller

~ John A. Williams

Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products.

~ Anton Chekhov

It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with all your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them.

~ Ray Bradbury

Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.

~ Audre Lorde

People are talking high of Thiruvalluvar. But in practice they do not respect his teachings. They act against him and disregard him.

~ Periyar E.v. Ramasamy

Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it.Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance.

~ Azar Nafisi

No matter how revolutionary people were, he said, they could not live without books. Without books, we would not understand the world; without books, we could not develop; without books, nature could not serve humanity.

~ Xinran

Our thoughts of literary renaissance should always center themselves on the removal of superstition, meanness, indignity and ignorance.

~ Periyar E.v. Ramasamy

The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the leading textbook used in elementary school. They were so widely used that sections in them became part of the national language. Theodore Roosevelt, scion of an elite New York family, schooled by private tutors, had been raised on the same textbooks as the children of Ohio farmers, Chicago tradesman, and New England fishermen. If you want to know what constituted being a good American from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, spend a few hours browsing through the sections in the McGuffey Readers.

~ Charles Murray