Literature Quotes

Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying.

~ Oscar Wilde

For thy sweet love remembr'd such wealth bringsThat then, I scorn to change my state with kings.

~ William Shakespeare

She knew exactly how she ought to feel, for she was well read in our greater and lesser English poets, but the unfortunate fact was that she did not really like being kissed at all.

~ Barbara Pym

The house was the color of baby vomit.

~ Pixie Lynn Whitfield

What on earth did you say to Isola? She stopped in on her way to pick up Pride and Prejudice and to berate me for never telling her about Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Why hadn't she known there were better love stories around? Stories not riddled with ill-adjusted men, anguish, death and graveyards!

~ Mary Ann Shaffer

This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy.... his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and The Wind in the Willows--big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children's book. The story told by The Lord of the Rings is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied.

~ Adam Gopnik

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.

~ W.b. Yeats

Hope without love is hopeless.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Later, you told me what your mother had said. How your father, the farmer, rose up slowly. You told me how your mother wailed on the other end of the phone, grieving her loss and complaining about the basketball of a goitre perched on her shoulder. She told you, your father walked onto the veranda and saw a chook floating ten feet above the ground. The chook didn’t flap a feather and just sat there brooding, swaying in the breeze.

~ Jon Gresham

Time in the most powerful thing.Not money, not power, not hope.A person can have everything theydesire but without time they are,all useless.

~ Akash Lakhotia

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

~ Franz Kafka

About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.

~ Virginia Woolf

I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in darkness. Any little success invades me and puts me in full view of everyone. I long to wallow in the mud. I can scarcely control my need for self-abasement, my craving for licentiousness and debauchery. Sin tempts me, forbidden pleasures lure me. I want to be both pig and hen, then kill them and drink their blood.

~ Clarice Lispector

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.

~ John Green

I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions. If man and woman can only dance upon this earth for a few countable turns of the sun... let each of us be an Artemis, Odysseus, or Zeus... Aphrodite to the extent of the will of each one.

~ Roman Payne

Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.

~ Lawrence Clark Powell

When the star dies, Its eye closes; tired of watching, It flies back to its first bright dream.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people

~ Heinrich Heine

Forget it. Never explain, never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

~ Thomas Mcguane

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.

~ Don Delillo

If birth is a manifestation of life, death is another.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Life into death— Life’s other shape, No rupture, Only crossing.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Every thought about death takes a moment of life away.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Sleep is death enjoyed.

~ Friedrich Hebbel

The truth is crazier than lies because lies are required to stick to possibilities—the truth isn’t.

~ Caroline George

Money has the power to get, all that you want.Money has the power to make you forget, all that you want.

~ Akash Lakhotia

Make mistakes, a thousand of them because we are only humans.Never repeat your mistakes because we are humans.

~ Akash Lakhotia

Most important thing in life is family,Without them you are nothing.Whatever you do will be worth nothing,If there is no one to appreciate it.

~ Akash Lakhotia

In this,journey,of reaching,to myself,I have had,many a,thoroughfares,goodbye affairs,reality checks,and,lovely overwhelms.

~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Some writers write to forget. Some forget to write.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

O' melancholy,hectic chill for human soul,herewith dismal presence,any spirit does descent.

~ Nithin Purple

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

~ Herman Melville

I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.

~ Kamand Kojouri

She might not have read many books. But when she reads a book, she swallows the very words. If you open the books on her shelves, you will find that the front and back covers encase white pages.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

~ Cassandra Clare

There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands awayNor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest takeWithout oppress of Toll – How frugal is the Chariot That bears a Human soul.

~ Emily Dickinson

Note, to-day, an instructive, curious spectacle and conflict. Science, (twin, in its fields, of Democracy in its)—Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious—surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains, (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry,) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.

~ Walt Whitman

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

~ Gaston Bachelard