Literature Quotes - Page 8

That's sounds right. Another $5,000 went to dress up the Little League park where he had played so many games. Seems like he paid off the MORTAGE on his parents' home, which wasn't that much.

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

There has never been any art or literature without drink and there never will be....Unless something is done about the matter [prohibition] this country is going to the dogs. There has been no development in our art or literature for 30 or 40 years.

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

Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

To be a good diarist one must have a little snouty sneaky mind.

Yet, the man never goes slow! Feted against all the odds.How? Nobody knows.Undeterred, unabated, yet uncharted he goes...

Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.

What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of "The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it because he too meets both conditions.

People recover differently. Some change cities, some fall in love and some begin writing.

... she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

Since nothing is absolute There is no absolute silence, Only an appearance Of temporary peace.

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture.

InsomniaI wonderIf those talks matterFew done in the clarity of dayOr the manyDone at 3 a.m. in the morning

There is a pledge of the big and of the small in the infinite.

The most difficult achievement is the capacity to see oneself, to name oneself, to imagine oneself. If in daily life we use ideologies, common sense, religion, even literature itself to disguise our experiences and make them presentable, in fiction it’s possible to sweep away all the veils—in fact, perhaps, it’s a duty.

The past is not another country; it is another life. The texture of daily living is different now than in the past, more different the further back we look, until we find people whose experiences created a psychology we might find baffling or rude. Many details that once made up the daily round are lost to us because people considered them too trivial to write down. Knowing the past means knowing what people carried in their pockets, what they did with their sewage, where their dogs slept. Those details may seem unimportant, but what they convey is not.

Tell me something only you know and make a new friend.

Every day in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question 'How shall I live?' is not one I can answer on prescription.

Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers.Scripps: No.Dakin: It's consolation. All literature is consolation.

Now I could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets which have nothing mythological about them. We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap.

Nothing is more hallowing than the union of kindred spirits in art. At the moment of meeting, the art lover transcends himself. At once he is and is not. He catches a glimpse of Infinity... Freed from the fetters of matter, his spirit moves in the rhythm of things. It is thus that art becomes akin to religion and ennobles mankind. It is this which makes a masterpiece something sacred.

I'm sick of the images trapped in my headI'm sick of being preoccupied with the dead

All people are enslaved by something.

No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart; then, finding sufficient sustenance in their rhythm and reveling in them at leisure, I closed the book and remained, trembling, more alive than I had thought possible, my mind numb with happiness.

A classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say.

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.

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.

The best books — like the best music or television or movies or comics or video games — can challenge us and force us to think or perceive aspects of life that we may prefer to avoid. In a sense, they threaten us.

The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men

Before the first before and after the last after, there is night waiting.

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

A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century 'reality', surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once embodied in myth. In approaching literature, it has aimed at restoring to the word its magical qualities. And at giving back to language the elemental power it once had within society. This determinism lies at the heart of the surrealist attitude and distinguishes it radically from the modernism which took shape contemporaneously with it.

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

Total knowledge is annihilation Of the desire to see, to touch, to feel The world sensed only through senses And immune to the knowledge without feeling.

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

To accomplish the perfect perfection, a little imperfection helps.

What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.

Your words... I hold them deeplike ancient skinshold wrinkles.

Books do pretend ...but squeezed in between is even more that is true—without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?

Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time.

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

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.

Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.

We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.

He was, however, unable to give much prolonged or continuous thought to anything that evening , or to concentrate on any one idea; and anyway, even if he had been able to, he would not have found his way to a solution of these questions in a conscious manner; now he could only feel. In place of dialectics life had arrived, and in his consciousness something of a wholly different nature must now work towards fruition.

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

The notion of "cause and effect" is sometimes useful in real life, and it can even be interesting in art, but I'm more interested in "cause and cause" or "effect and effect" or "and and and".

The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.

[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.

Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.""I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.

Whom boasts about his happiness, cause doesn't got it!

[T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.