Literature Quotes

I was beginning to understand something I couldn't articulate. It was a jazzy feeling in my chest, a fluttering, a kind of buzzing in my brain. Warmth. Life. The circulation of blood. Sanguinity. I don't know. I understood the enormous risk of telling the truth, how the telling could result in every level of hell reigning down on you, your skin scorched to the bone and then bone to ash and then nothing but a lingering odour of shame and decomposition, but now I was also beginning to understand the new and alien feeling of taking the risk and having the person on the other end of the telling, the listener, say: Bad shit at home? You guys are running away? Yeah, I said. I understand, said, Noehmi.

~ Miriam Toews

She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything

~ Nick Hornby

Irma, she said. But I had started to walk away. I heard her say some more things but by then I had yanked my skirt up and was running down the road away from her and begging the wind to obliterate her voice. She wanted to live with me. She missed me. She wanted me to come back home. She wanted to run away. She was yelling all this stuff and I wanted so badly for her to shut up. She was quiet for a second and I stopped running and turned around once to look at her. She was a thimble-sized girl on the road, a speck of a living thing. Her white-blond hair flew around her head like a small fire and it was all I could see because everything else about her blended in with the countryside. He offered you a what? she yelled. An espresso! I yelled back. It was like yelling at a shorting wire or a burning bush. What is it? she said. Coffee! I yelled. Irma, can I come and live--I turned around again and began to run.

~ Miriam Toews

While gazing at myself from yourself, I was beautiful.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

He will understand when it is too late that it is easier to love.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

~ Glen Duncan

Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I’ve no regrets.

~ Roman Payne

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless.

~ Charles Bukowski

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

What you gain here, you lose on the other side.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Long ago we conquered our passions looking at ourselves in the mirror of eternity.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth, literary tops. Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust itself. As a final observation, I should like to add that it is impossible today for anyone to feel innocent, if in whatever we do or say we can discover a hidden motive - that of a white man, or a male, or the possessor of a certain income, or a member of a given economic system, or a sufferer from a certain neurosis - this should not induce in us either a universal sense of guilt or an attitude of universal accusation. When we become aware of our disease or of our hidden motives, we have already begun to get the better of them. What matters is the way in which we accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are - that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being.

~ Italo Calvino

In greatness, life and death merge.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

From one bell all the bells toll.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Long ago an uncalled rain fell and a called-upon God stayed equally distant.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds.

~ Don Delillo

If you have a big heart, you will live a large life.

~ Yvonne Jayne

They are both spectacular, Life and death.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Poirot, watching him, felt suddenly a doubt--an uncomfortable twinge. Was there, here, something that he had missed? Some richness of the spirit? Sadness crept over him. Yes, he should have become acquainted with the classics. Long ago. Now, alas, it was too late....

~ Agatha Christie

The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him.

~ R.m. Engelhardt (Talon)

It's a special form of scholarly neurosis,´ said Camel. `He's no longer able to distinguish between life and literature.´

~ David Lodge

Literary style is like crystal-ware: the cleaner the wineglass, the brighter the brilliance. As a reader, I agree with those who believe that a colour of the dress, which a character has on, as well as any enumeration and description of dishes at dinner or in the kitchen should be mentioned only in case if all this has a strong consequent relation to the plot, but as an author, I can’t help mentioning all this, with no particular reason, just for love for my characters, desiring to give them something nice and pleasant. Melancholy grows a platinum rose. Affection grows a double rose.

~ Lara Biyuts

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine.

~ Ian Mcewan

One hand I extend into myself, the other toward others.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

I travel, always arriving in the same place.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

We will go far away, to nowhere, to conquer, to fertilize until we become tired. Then we will stop and there will be our home.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Through everything I have passed but nowhere I have been.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

All dust is the same dust. Temporarily separated To go peacefully And enjoy the eternal nap.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

And this that you call solitude is in fact a big crowd.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Life eats life to live.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Mathematics doesn’t care about those beyond the numbers.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

With me: one minus one = one, with you: it’s zero. Here lies the only difference.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Neither alive nor dead; No one lets up, No one wins.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

He awaits himself while walking, out of the icy circle to escape.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Instead of imitating me, you simply loiter.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

To jump over centuries In one step is impossible. Jump too high or far, You’ll be way too late.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

In the end, the world returns to a grain.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Death swallows death.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Vandals listen only when others are stronger.If vandals are equal or strongerTheir word is the last word.

~ Dejan Stojanovic