Literature Quotes

Bob, I am grateful for yourThree letter name.It's another reminder of homeOf a world predictableOf a life I had.

~ Wilfred Waters

You stand for what is right-for the patient and the staff.Pressures of work may down you,maybe bent but not broken.

~ Mujel Hasan

Haris...as a naive migrantwho just moved here,relying on you tapered worries.

~ Tammy Sulit

Even the new things thatI less than know,I keep trying, did againuntil perfect.

~ Alliah Lenzkie Tabaya

Growing up, I loved the tale of Peter Rabbit and also books on Pippi Longstocking. Pippi was a girl who had so much fun and was very daring. My sons loved all the Dr. Seuss books

~ Soraya Diase Coffelt

The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding.

~ Minae Mizumura

Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place. And if there is no answer, only literature can point to the impossibility of ever finding one.

~ Minae Mizumura

I never thought I'd fall madly in love with literature.

~ Wency June Libot

Her works are said to be too far from reality to be considered real literature. “Why doesn’t she write about life?” the people of Rabbit Back ask.

~ Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

The great writings interact with one another. They cannot be read in isolation..

~ Richard J. Foster

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

~ Harold Bloom

Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out …

~ Ben Marcus

With her it's as if a text was written so that we can identify the characters, the narrator, the setting, the plot, the time of the story, and so on. I don't think it has ever occurred to her that a text is written above all to be read and to arouse emotions in the reader.

~ Muriel Barbery

Valuing a writer only for their diversity, but not their humanity or talent – that’s tokenism.

~ Sunili Govinnage

Perhaps somebody has alredy written it. But I want to write a story from the end till the very beginning.

~ Alexander Zalan

Personally I know only one person who wrote about utopia. Afterwards he was executed. I suppose it's not my genre.

~ Alexander Zalan

This view of literature as an aesthetic object that could make us ‘better people’ is linked to a certain idea of the subject, to what theorists have come to call ‘the liberal subject’, the individual defined not by a social situation and interests but by an individual subjectivity (rationality and morality) conceived as essentially free of social determinants.

~ Jonathan Culler

Getting my legal situation fixed takes a bit longer than we all thought: twelve years to be exact. Not a big deal. Only most of my life.

~ Patricio Maya

But it seems to me inevitable that any person who gives thoughtful and imaginative attention to literature must be awakened in his sensibilities, enlarged in his sympathies, sharpened in his critical faculties.

~ Denham Sutcliffe

People are always saying these things about how there's no need to read literature anymore-that it won't help the world. Everyone should apparently learn to speak Mandarin, and learn how to write code for computers. More young people should go into STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math. And that all sounds to be true and reasonable. But you can't say that what you learn in English class doesn't matter. That great writing doesn't make a difference. I'm different. It's hard to put into words, but it's true. Words matter.

~ Meg Wolitzer

Burnout at its deepest level is not the result of some train wreck of examinations, long call shifts, or poor clinical evaluations. It is the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice. When a great ship steams across the ocean, even tiny ripples can accumulate over time, precipitating a dramatic shift in course. There are many Tertius Lydgates, male and female, inhabiting the lecture halls, laboratories, and clinics of today’s medical schools. Like latter-day Lydgates, many of them eventually find themselves expressing amazement and disgust at how far they have veered from their primary purpose.

~ Richard Gunderman

Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.

~ Greil Marcus

Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.

~ Lorrie Moore

They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a sextet of calico isotropes and into the street, the elder smiling, along through the crowds and down the road toward the river still single file and with deadpan decorum leaving behind a congregation mute and astounded.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on what was left of his property sawing at it with a knife and hauling on the skin and cursing. The dirty half flayed pig looked like something recovered from a shallow grave.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Why would a book in which hardly anything happened for most of the time eat at me so much? It was the weirdest thing

~ Cynthia Kadohata

To my fellow writers' I say, 'Write. Build an imaginary world like nobody's watching.

~ Terry A. O'neal

I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I now felt that I knew what the white man were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book.

~ Richard Wright

Don't you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you've surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him up in a few moments in quick little mouthfuls and leave only a perfectly clean skeleton behind? So, that's the way they're constituted. 'Do you want a clean life, like everyone else?' Of course the answer is yes. How could you not? 'Fine. We'll clean you up. Here's a job, here's a family, here's some organized leisure.' And the little teeth bite into the flesh, right down to the bone. But i'm being unfair. I shouldn't have said, 'the way they're constituted', because after all, it's our way, too: it's a case of who strips whom.

~ Albert Camus

His feet went banging down some stairs. He closed his eyes. They went through cinders and dirt, his heels gathering small windrows of trash. A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. The rusting carcass of an automobile passed slowly on his right. Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea. He lay with his head on the moldy upholstery of an old car seat among packingcrates and broken shoes and suncrazed rubber toys in the dark. Something warm was running on his chest. He put up a hand. I am bleeding. Unto my death.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same bolt of cloth and in the church pew standing six across they looked like a strip of gaudy wallpaper cut into those linked dolls madfolk pass their time in fashioning.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're decoding

~ Maureen Corrigan

It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world the symbol is the thing.

~ Neil Gaiman

(Emerson's) aphorisms tend to be chicken soup for the academic soul or gobledygook of a man who prefers the sounds of words to their meanings.

~ Micah Mattix

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

~ Maureen Corrigan

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.

~ Maureen Corrigan

The committees scour the bookstores, printing and publishing houses, paying particular attention to secondhand bookstores. There, they requisition countless copies of 'Incautious Maidens' or 'Flames at the Metropole.' So that those who prefer the false view of the world presented in cheap novels will never find refuge again.

~ Mariusz Szczygieł

My own mother, who's always dazzled by my faculty and answering questions in the literature a category on Jeopardy whenever we watch it together, keeps urging me to try to get on the show to make all those years spent reading finally pay off. Leave me alone I'm reading

~ Maureen Corrigan