Literature Quotes

Here we are in the century of information, that is to say the unformed. Every kind of literature will be journalistic, with a science for ballast.

~ Julien Torma

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. This requires a moment of pause--a contract with yourself through the object you look at or the page you read. In that moment of pause, I think life expands. And really the purpose of art--for me, of fiction--is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have. That is the moment of finding something which you have not known about yourself, or your environment, about others and about life.

~ Jerzy Kosiński

One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling, it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing gown.

~ Stella Gibbons

A page of a book is like a human face. Look at a page by Hemingway and compare it with Sterne and Marcel Proust. They are different typographical beings. But force upon them those ragged edges, and the influence of the author’s style on the physical aspect of the page, their typographical physiognomy will disappear. No, unjustified setting is a sort of gleichschaltung [enforced conformity] through diversity, a very phoney diversity. Produced methodically by chance. For the comfort of the keyboard, and not for the comfort of the eye.

~ Stefan Themerson

Oh? And what's so stinking about it?.

~ Anthony Burgess

Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other’s hearts. I guess there’s other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You’re always home.

~ Eileen Myles

People don’t read to enlighten themselves or seek to gain some valuable insight into their own psychology. People read to escape.

~ Dermot Davis

By their very nature, idiots do not have the intellectual capacity to identify genius. All that idiots are mentally equipped to recognize are other idiots.

~ Dermot Davis

O, great wise man,' she said, 'I have been wondering so many things. Is life more than sitting at home doing the same thing over and over? Wise man, is life more than watching one's relatives do unpleasant things, or more than grim tasks one must perform at school and at work? Is life more than being entertained by literature, wise man, or more than traveling from one place to another, suffering from poor emotional health and pondering the people one loves? And what about those who lead a life of mystery? And the mysteries of life? And, wise man, what about the overall feeling of doom that one cannot ever escape no matter what one does, and miscellaneous things that I have neglected to mention in specific?

~ Lemony Snicket

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger - Billy Connolly

~ Sherry Marie Gallagher

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

~ Zbigniew Herbert

As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.

~ William H. Gass

Oh literature is a wonderful thing, Varenka, a very wonderful thing: I discovered that from being with those people the day before yesterday. It is a profound thing. It strengthens people’s hearts and instructs them,… Literature is a picture, or rather in a certain sense both a picture and a mirror; it is an expression of emotion, a subtle form of criticism, a didactic lesson and a document…

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.

~ Zbigniew Herbert

Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say a shocking, realization. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that. And yet.

~ John Banville

Literature is the question without the answer. Philosophy is the answer without the question.

~ Chloe Thurlow

Every child deserves to be a boat cast out in a sea of books.

~ K. Lamb

Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down.

~ Walter Pater

We obtained literature by our own efforts, it is a product of our own life, and that is why we love it so much and hold it so dear, why we pin our hopes on it.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Anything could happen in the company of a woman whose usual status is ‘apparition’.

~ Margot Mccuaig

Banks watched the sun creep over the forest of oak trees and a crack of light broke through the night and grew longer and wider and ate the black like a fungus until the darkness was gone and there was light and it was day.

~ Matthew Mcbride

My words, my writing, my actions—these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.

~ Pramoedya Ananta Toer

We have the power to shape our lives, by the way we think. Only that to have a progressive life, we must train ourselves into thinking in a certain way.

~ Ndiritu Wahome

… I don't know what to say.'‘That’s okay. Sometimes talking is like singing in a storm.’‘Like when you’re scared?’‘Exactly.’‘Or when you’re sad?’‘That too. A voice can be reassuring.

~ Élise Turcotte

Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it with (Jonathan) Swift's anger. Instead, he hoped the example of his dictionary would temper that change by providing a distinguished literary example

~ Robert Lane Greene

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both good story and good words, treasure that book.

~ Stephen King

What is hell to a writer? Hell is being too busy to find the time to write or being unable to find the inspiration. Hell is suddenly finding the words but being away from your notebook or typewriter. Hell is when the verses slip away through your fingers and they never return again.

~ R.m. Engelhardt (Talon)

Books are a staircase to unknown worlds.

~ Jason Ellis

Many of the greatest books are like a forest. “The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.

~ Anthony M. Esolen

Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. (p. 5)

~ Rabih Alameddine

A month later the law student leaves you for one of her classmates, tells you that it was great but she has to start being realistic. . . . .Later you see her with said classmate on the Yard. He's even lighter than you but he still looks unquestionably black. He's also like nine feet tall and put together like an anatomy primer. They are walking hand in hand and she looks so very happy that you try to find the space in your heart not to begrudge her.

~ Junot Díaz

The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class.

~ John Williams

I find it sad that more Christian literature does not address miracles, and the possibility of demons in our midst. Jesus performed countless miracles in his life that were clearly discussed in the New Testament. And, he cast out demons. Why do some Christians act as those the potential for miracles died with Him? Why do people believe in angels, but not demons? Both were evident in the Bible.

~ D.l. Koontz

I can't bear literary snobbery.

~ Sara Sheridan

But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.

~ John Williams

Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the ‘language of Shakespeare’... sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the loss to humanity that the world-dominance of any one language now spoken would entail: no language has ever possessed but a small fraction of the varied excellences of human speech, and each language represents a different vision of life ...

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

When you write a story, don't just write it - live it;When putting words into the mouth of a protagonist (or any character) imagine yourself saying them and while writing about the reaction of the listener, write it the way you would react.Let the conversations not be meant merely to be read but felt as well.If you do not feel what you write; how can you expect the readers to feel it?

~ Arti Honrao

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.

~ Jamaica Kincaid

Crammed among the stacks of books in his room, the author treated literature as if each book were a window in a city of unstable skyscrapers, and he was the window-washer tasked with the impossible job of cleaning them all.” - from “Pageturner” in “365 Tomorrows

~ Joseph Patrick Pascale