Literature Quotes

I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say.

~ Oscar Wilde

I was working in silence seeking no appreciation or respect from any one. And it is always the silence from which great literature is born.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.

~ Thomas C. Foster

The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

~ Robert Macfarlane

Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.

~ Robert Mckee

Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' and it's sad, gay nostalgia.

~ Truman Capote

Yes, looking through the eyes of literature we may talk about the beauty of sadness! But in the eyes of truth, sadness is just saddening; there is no beauty there, only a touching desperation!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

In literature, the reader standing at the threshold of the end of a book harbors no illusion that the end has not come—he or she can see where it finishes, the abyss the other side of the last chunk of text. Which means that the writer is never in danger of ending too soon—or if he does the reader has been so forewarned. This is the advantage a book has over a film—it is the brain that marshals forward the text and controls the precise moment of conclusion of the book, as the density of the pages thins. A film can end without you if you’ve fallen asleep or, because you can’t wait any longer to use the bathroom, slipped out of the darkness of the theatre salon, and missed it. There will never be a form more perfect than the book, which always moves at your pace, that sits waiting for you exactly where you’ve left it and never goes on without you.

~ John M. Keller

It’s hard to say something about Pushkin to a person who doesn’t know anything about him. Pushkin is a great poet. Napoleon is not as great as Pushkin. Bismarck compared to Pushkin is a nobody. And the Alexanders, First, Second and Third, are just little kids compared to Pushkin. In fact, compared to Pushkin, all people are little kids, except Gogol. Compared to him, Pushkin is a little kid.And so, instead of writing about Pushkin, I would rather write about Gogol.Although, Gogol is so great that not a thing can be written about him, so I'll write about Pushkin after all.Yet, after Gogol, it’s a shame to have to write about Pushkin. But you can’t write anything about Gogol. So I’d rather not write anything about anyone.

~ Daniil Kharms

Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.

~ Carol Ann Duffy

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

~ Milan Kundera

If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Zizek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Zizek on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.

~ Roger Scruton

Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here…think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.

~ Alasdair Gray

I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.

~ Pat Conroy

I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

~ Pat Conroy

Love has always been the chief business of my life, the only thing I have thought—no, felt—supremely worth while, and I don’t pretend that this experience was not succeeded by others. But at that time, I was innocent, with the innocence of ignorance, I didn’t know what was happening to me. I was without consciousness, that is to say, more utterly absorbed than was ever possible again. For after that first time there was always part of me standing aside, comparing, analysing, objecting: ‘Is this real? Is this sincere?’ All the world of my predecessors was there before me, taking, as it were, the bread out of my mouth. Was this stab in my heart, this rapture, really mine or had I merely read about it? For every feeling, every vicissitude of my passion, there would spring into my mind a quotation from the poets. Shakespeare or Donne or Heine had the exact phrase for it. Comforting, perhaps, but enraging too. Nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own. As the blood dripped from the wound, there was always part of me to watch with a smile and a sneer: ‘Literature! Mere literature! Nothing to make a fuss about!’ And then I would add, ‘But so Mercutio jested as he died!

~ Dorothy Bussy

To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping.

~ Richard Flanagan

I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.

~ Flannery O'connor

Everything is still everything.The Poem Remains.

~ R.m. Engelhardt (Talon)

Here at last was an Attendant Spirit to liberate us from the spells of Burkhardt or Addington Symonds and challenge the easy antithesis of fantastic and fideistic Middle Ages versus logical and free-thinking Renaissance. And it is a prime justification of medieval studies that if properly pursued they soon dispose of such facile distinctions, and overthrow the barriers of narrow specialism and textbook chronology. In this sense medieval just as much as classical studies make men more humane. It would indeed be hard to separate in Lewis' culture the one from the other: just as hard as it is to understand the Middle Ages themselves without knowing classical literature or the Renaissance without knowing the Middle Ages. This continuity of literature and of learning Lewis not only asserted but embodied.

~ Jocelyn Gibb

The responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

~ Natalie Goldberg

A Christian message or moral cannot redeem a text marred by shoddy workmanship.

~ Susan Gallagher

But now books and men had gone their separate ways. Who has the patience for a book? Only a book.

~ John M. Keller

Writers block occurs when a writer has nothing to say. Unfortunately not all writers experience it.

~ Ron Brackin

We are all orbits of some sort,circling around the world we call our own, and literature...Literature is a compass

~ ;Thabo Jijana

He suddenly saw the enterprise of literature as essentially mad.

~ Mark Beauregard

Literature has become merely a tool for culture studies.

~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

Stories shape the world.

~ Lance Conrad

I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.

~ Rabih Alameddine

Literature is the product of a deep-seated need for honesty. Hence, those who lie most are struck most deeply by it, and those who are honest have no need for it.

~ Anthony Marais

Of Books and Scribes there are no end:This Plague--and who can doubt it?Dismays me so, I've sadly pennedAnother book about it.

~ Robert W. Service

Quote of the day.Al, for want of anything better to do, is standing nodding his head. This reminds Faron of those stupid dogs that people put in their cars, that when the car moves, the dogs frantically nod their heads, like some demented, freshly graduated psychologist, with their first patients.

~ Gary Edward Gedall

Of everythingI have ever endured,YOUareMy Favourite Tragedy.

~ Meraaqi

There is a part of everything which is unexplored,because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.

~ Guy De Maupassant

The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it.

~ Annie Proulx

Starving artist: starving for affection, starving for attention

~ Jessica-Lynn Barbour

We dreamt of a crappy apartment somewhereMaking love while we let the midnight airFlow through the open window, into our closed heartsLeft bitter from heartbreak and too much time apart

~ Jessica-Lynn Barbour

Will I ever see the mountains or am I doomed to roam the flatlands?

~ Jessica-Lynn Barbour

Literature does not occur in a vacuum. It cannot be a monologue. It has to be a conversation, and new people, new readers, need to be brought into the conversation too.

~ Neil Gaiman

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

~ Mark Twain