Literature Quotes - Page 6

Every book has to wait for the right time to be read and understood.

I am never long even in the society of her I love without yearning for the company of my lamp and my library.

Literature is an invitation to people to discover the world of others and the world of others is the best source to understand and to improve our own world!

For most of us free-thinking, wild hearts, our relationship with God or the Universe will go through peaks and valleys – transforming into new concepts and beliefs, completely disappearing, at times, only then to instantly explode back into existence by something even as small as a sunset!

Every star was once darker than the night, before it awoke.

Without space, there is no time.

For a moment at least, be a smile on someone else’s face.

Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.

When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing--maybe one of the best things about literature. It's always an adventure of some kind.

The history of time is captured by poet, artist, writer, photographer…!

this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.

In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched by art, is a misshapen man. An incomplete man.

Why poetry, you ask? Because of life, I answer.

Can you identify the source preventing you from feeling good every single day, from loving yourself unconditionally and making your dreams come true? Is it a voice in your head or a gut wrenching ache that compromises your inner peace and doesn’t allow you to accept the love around you? Is there one thing, or maybe many things, keeping you from forgiving your past and moving forward, tormenting you with lies like “You don’t deserve real love so just settle for whatever you can get,” “You’re not smart enough to achieve your dream so don’t even try,” or “Look at your past… you should hate yourself way more than you actually do!”?Welcome to your Little Monster.

I never thought I'd fall madly in love with literature.

Homicide is not a sin. It is sometimes a necessary violence on resistant and ossified forms of existence which have ceased to be amusing. In the interests of an important and fascinating experiment, it can even become meritorious. Here is the starting point of a new apologia for sadism.

If you are a singer, you must sing. If you are a dancer, you must dance. If you are a writer, you must write. Don’t suffocate your heart.

Writing poems is simply an excuse to remember You.

When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent.

Of course, there were other sorts of literature -- theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical -- but they were just dry wanks.

Some books must be sipped slowly like a strong bourbon. Most books must be devoured more than once because as you age you distill more.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

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.

A rural Venus, Selah rises from thegold foliage of the Sixhiboux River, sweepspetals of water from her skin. At once,clouds begin to sob for such beauty.Clothing drops like leaves."No one makes poetry,my Mme.Butterfly, my Carmen, in Whylah,”I whisper. She smiles: “We’ll shape it withour souls.”Desire illuminates the dark manuscriptof our skin with beetles and butterflies.After the lightning and rain has ceased,after the lightning and rain of lovemakinghas ceased, Selah will dive again into thesunflower-open river.

It was like hiking into a Hemingway story everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext.

We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.

And adab towards language means the recognition and acknowledgement of the rightful and proper place of every word in a written or uttered sentence so as not to produce a dissonance in meaning, sound and concept. Literature is called adabiyat in Islam precisely because it is seen as the keeper of civilization, the collector of teachings and statements that educate the self and society with adab such that both are elevated to the rank of the cultured man (insan adabi) and society.

Prayer is an insurance policy that you can never lapse on.

The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.

We have just discovered our dear colleague butchered in a hotel room, and you wish to discuss literature?

My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one.

Books have that strange quality, that being of the frailest and tenderest matter, they outlast brass, iron and marble.

Clarissa had a theory in those days - they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people.

There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

I gather," he added, "that you've never had much time to study the classics?""That is so.""Pity. Pity. You've missed a lot. Everyone should be made to study the classics, if I had my way."Poirot shrugged his shou

A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.

I fly through memory to find a newborn love.

Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it.

In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in darkness without the relief of compassion, the voice of an exceptional poet producing exceptional work is not something the world can afford to dismiss.

your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now you alter its pace with your own rhythm you play upon me, drumming me taught.

Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self – delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving.

Death has been said to be the leveller in that it does not recognize one’s class, race,ethnicity or nationality. Death does not look at the face before it strikes; it pays noattention to one’s beliefs or outlook to issues in life. Death has often been said to beinevitable. So it is glaring that for as long as people are born, people are bound to diesomeday but how man dies is a huge mystery.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

In the present day, when popular literature is running into the low levels of life, and luxuriating on the vices and follies of mankind; and when the universal pursuit of gain is trampling down the early growth of poetic feeling, and wearing out the verdure of the soul, I question whether it would not be of service for the reader occasionally to turn to these records of prouder times and loftier modes of thinking; and to steep himself to the very lips in old Spanish romance.

This view of literature as an aesthetic object that could make us ‘better people’ is linked to a certain idea of the subject, to what theorists have come to call ‘the liberal subject’, the individual defined not by a social situation and interests but by an individual subjectivity (rationality and morality) conceived as essentially free of social determinants.

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.

Sang Ly, we are literature-our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow. Literature has been called a handbook for the art of being human.

Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.

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!

What is fantasy? On one level, of course, it is a game: a pure pretense with no ulterior motive whatever. It is one child saying to another child, “Let’s be dragons,” and then they’re dragons for an hour or two. It is escapism of the most admirable kind—the game played for the game’s sake. On another level, it is still a game, but a game played for very high stakes. Seen thus, as art, not spontaneous play, its affinity is not with daydream, but with dream. It is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary, not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes, which, Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously.

You never know who you're inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think.

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.

Every kingdom has three pillars: Poet, Sword and Law.

Books are a staircase to unknown worlds.

If I could change the attitude of young men toward literature, I would want them to read not just for escape, but because literature can be more truthful about things like sex, commitment, and aging. It can be more truthful about the stuff that our parents lied to us (and themselves) about, and the stuff that everyone has to lie about. It can all be dealt with truthfully in fiction and poetry.

Reading is a time machine that allows you to acquire wisdom from the past and to analyze and imagine another person’s vision of the future.

For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints.