Literature Quotes

All I wanted was to be loved for myself. (Erik)

~ Gaston Leroux

Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

~ Jane Austen

I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.

~ Jane Austen

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

~ Julian Barnes

Time is a river...and books are boats. Many volumes start down that stream, only to be wrecked and lost beyond recall in its sands. Only a few, a very few, endure the testings of time and live to bless the ages following.

~ Joseph Fort Newton

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

~ Mark Twain

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

~ Kingsley Amis

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

~ Chinua Achebe

Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.

~ Nadeem Aslam

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.

~ D.h. Lawrence

It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream--a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought--a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

~ Mark Twain

I like my coffee with cream and my literature with optimism.

~ Abigail Reynolds

O love, O fire! once he drewWith one long kiss my whole soul throughMy lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.

~ Alfred Tennyson

As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again.

~ Margaret Mitchell

Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.

~ Oscar Wilde

It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.

~ Isaac Asimov

I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But, probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clapsed her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: 'Oh, Hermann.... It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

Whatever is produced in haste goes hastily to waste.

~ Saadi

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

~ William S. Burroughs

Ela acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam | She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed

~ Clarice Lispector

That cloak of love you were wearing—he’s torn it to shreds, undoing the seams of trust that held it together. How can you ever wear those shreds?

~ Antonia Michaelis

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

~ Christopher Hitchens

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I felt a wish never to leave that room - a wish that dawn might never come, that my present frame of mind might never change.

~ Leo Tolstoy

I hated labels anyway. People didn’t fit in slots—prostitute, housewife, saint—like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

~ Janet Fitch

What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

~ Brent Weeks

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

~ Italo Calvino

Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible.

~ Bart D. Ehrman

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

~ Oscar Wilde

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.

~ Cathy Caruth

Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.

~ Jonathan Stroud

The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.

~ John Green

We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.

~ F. Sionil José

Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he’s wrong.

~ Chad Harbach

She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.

~ Marcel Proust

It was a time I slept in many rooms, called myself by many names. I wandered through the quarters of the city like alluvium wanders the river banks. I knew every kind of joy, ascents of every hue. Mine was the twilight and the morning. Mine was a world of rooftops and love songs.

~ Roman Payne

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries

~ Italo Calvino

I shouted the perfect words to scare him off. It was just the delivery (and only the delivery) that made me sound like a twelve-year-old girl with pee running down her leg. I felt dirty and stupid.

~ Graham Parke