Literature Quotes

I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

~ Laurence Sterne

I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.

~ Mordecai Richler

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature

~ Anita Brookner

I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.

~ Flannery O'connor

Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

~ Kathy Acker

...there are only two things that really matter in life. Literature and love.

~ Daphne Kalotay

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

~ Flannery O'connor

You must be more gentle, dear, more sedate,' Ellen told her daughter. 'You must not interrupt gentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than they do. Gentlemen do not like forward girls.

~ Margaret Mitchell

Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night--hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ago in the dark northern woods for instance) with universal radiance. Faithless sons, wars and typhoons, fields of blood, greed and knives: our literature's full of such stories. And yet suppose for an instant that it wasn't the complacent father but his bored daughter who was the Prime Mover; suppose that what came first wasn't an appetite for drama but the urge to awaken it. Mightn't we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe?

~ Kathryn Davis

So long as there is gold underneath, who cares about the dust on top? Literature! That old whore! We must try to dose her with mercury and pills and clean her out from top to bottom, she has been so ultra-screwed by filthy pricks!

~ Gustave Flaubert

Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.

~ Miguel Syjuco

Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

~ G.k. Chesterton

How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls Come through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.

~ E.m. Forster

[On Female Attraction to Men in Uniform] That male military persona feeds a subconscious, passive-aggressive female desire to dominate the warrior as he is perceived an iconic example of masculinity (particularly amongst traditionally warlike cultures). The damsel in distress theme always struck me as embodying this: the hapless, innocently beautiful woman unwittingly enraptures the heroic male so completely that he would risk all to submit to her at his own peril, and quite in spite of it.

~ Tiffany Madison

Life isn't simple. Literature shouldn't be either.

~ Mark Slouka

Literature is a writer's secret life recorded in symbols.

~ Will Lavender

The end of the world can be cozy at times.

~ Mohsin Hamid

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

~ Roland Barthes

I shall tell you what I believe. I believe God is a librarian. I believe that literature is holy...it is that best part of our souls that we break off and give each other, and God has a special dispensation for it, angels to guard its making and its preservation.

~ Sarah Smith

...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.

~ William Carlos Williams

If a teacher has only love for the cause, it will be a good teacher. If a teacher has only love for student, as a father, mother, he will be better than the teacher, who read all the books, but has no love for the cause, nor to the students. If the teacher combines love to the cause and to his disciples, he is the perfect teacher.

~ Leo Tolstoy

If you want to know a country, read its writers.

~ Aminatta Forna

But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is. Only I do get tired.

~ Melanie Benjamin

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

~ Henry James

You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as ROBINSON CRUSOE never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years—generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco—and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad—ROBINSON CRUSOE. When I want advice—ROBINSON CRUSOE. In past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much—ROBINSON CRUSOE. I have worn out six stout ROBINSON CRUSOES with hard work in my service. On my lady's last birthday she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and ROBINSON CRUSOE put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain.

~ Wilkie Collins

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

~ John Steinbeck

Nobody could catch cold by the sea; nobody wanted appetite by the sea; nobody wanted spirits; nobody wanted strength. Sea air was healing, softening, relaxing -- fortifying and bracing -- seemingly just as was wanted -- sometimes one, sometimes the other. If the sea breeze failed, the seabath was the certain corrective; and where bathing disagreed, the sea air alone was evidently designed by nature for the cure.

~ Jane Austen

Did you think of anything when Miss Marcy said Scoatney Hall was being re-opened? I thought of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice – where Mrs. Bennet says 'Netherfield Park is let a last.' And then Mr. Bennet goes over to call on the rich new owner.

~ Dodie Smith

But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

~ David Mitchell

What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall-- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing. ((p. 62, Reading & Writing)

~ V.s. Naipaul

But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight — matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows.

~ Leon Wieseltier

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

~ Roland Barthes

Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.

~ Terry Pratchett

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

~ David Shields

But he'll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one's soul.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

The text contains no literary criticism. I wanted to describe books, not to be clever at their expense.

~ Kenneth Mcleish

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibilit. But again, to exist mean: 'being-in-the-world.' Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities.

~ Milan Kundera

In the course of time, Michael Strogoff reached a high station in the Empire. But it is not the history of his success, but the history of his trials, which deserves to be related.

~ Jules Verne