Literature Quotes - Page 9

Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as a metaphor for the fleeting, fantasy-ridden quality of actual human lives. It is we who are made of dreams, not just such figments of Shakespeare’s imagination as Ariel and Caliban. The cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of this earth are mere stage scenery after all.

To maintain your honesty , one must know to keep alive the spirit of chidhood

Life itself has lost its plane reality: it is projected, not along the old fixed points, but along the dynamic coordinates of Einstein, of revolution. In this new projection, the best-known formulas and objects become displaced, fantastic, familiar-unfamiliar. This is why it is so logical for literature today to be drawn to the fantastic plot, or to the amalgam of reality and fantasy. ("The New Russian Prose")

When wisdom comes, transformation comes. Wisdom makes the difference between the succeeding man and the failing man.

No man's advice can change you unless you speak to yourself. Bible school or seminars can't change you, going to church can't change you except you decide to change.Psalm 139:23 - 24

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

...begged them as we read our literary texts, only to listen. To wrench open - it takes an effort of will - the portcullis to their teenage hearts for just a couple of hours once a week, to humbly admit another, and better - a Yeats or Shakespeare, a Crazy Jane or Hamlet - and to welcome them, to allow for those tiny spots of time some vibration in the jelly of being, that makes, once it has settled, a subtle new mould... Otherwise, I would observe tartly...you are merely going to become a product of your family, the few friends you might make and the few lovers you may garner...nothing more than a function of your upbringing - a type. Whereas, if you will only read, and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being. It is literature and only literature than can do this.

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that's exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours digging a tunnel to enter the strongroom of a bank. He emerges face to face with hundreds of strongboxes, all identical, and opens them one by one. And each time a box is opened, it loses its anonymity and becomes unique: one is filled with paintings, another with a bundle of banknotes, a third with jewels or letters tied in ribbon, engravings, objects of no value at all, silverware, photos, gold sovereigns, dried flowers, files of paper, crystal glasses, or children’s toys--and so on. There is something intoxicating about opening a new one, finding its contents and feeling overjoyed that in a trice one is no longer in front of a set of boxes, but in the presence of the riches and wretched banalities that make up human existence.

Without travels, our existence, our memories, our literature, our dreams, our everything would be very poor, very boring, very limited!

Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.

Literature is my utopia.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.

Despite how lonely or broken down you might feel, we need you with us helping to make the world better, kinder and safer, especially for the little girls coming up.

There is more to hear in what is not said.

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

Luckily for me, I loved books. Books can enlighten but can also benight, but at least one can play one off against another.

You battled monsters. You sweat and cried your way to this one prolific moment where you finally realize that those dark days and sleepless nights were pre-requisites to your becoming.

I can find my biography in every fable that I read.

The writer who develops a beautiful style, but has nothing to say, represents a kind of arrested esthetic development; he is like a pianist who acquires a brilliant technique by playing finger-exercises, but never gives a concert.

If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor.

Think not of the fragility of life, but of the power of books, when mere words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness.

Behind Tana there was the sounds of splintering wood, as though something very large had hot the door. "No," she said softly, "Oh no. No." "Leave me," said Gavriel. ....."Shut up or I might," she told him.

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

Wherever I go, I meet myself.

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.

Later that night though, as I stayed awake into the early hours of morning devouring the second novel in a series, I understood what it meant to befriend a book. The books knew me, far better than I knew them; they knew my fears, my doubts, my dreams. They gave words to feelings I did not even realize I experienced. They listened. They consoled. They kept me company. The books gave me a life outside of my own.

It is easy to see the glow but hard to recognize the awakening of silence.

Literature is sacred knowledge

To expect to be kissed having bad breath is the secret of a fool.

We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.

Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night.

My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful.

Dreams are our only geography—our native land.

Her gaze dims as her nostalgia for Palermo overcomes her. Those smells of seaweed dried by the sun, of capers, of ripe figs, she will never find them anywhere else; those burnt and scented shores, those waves slowly breaking, jasmine petals flaking in the sun.

I am very careful about who I choose to build memories with. Some of them might last a lifetime.

Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.

Literature endures like the universal spirit,And its breath becomes a part of the vitals of all men.

I travel to the ancient world by reading ancient books.

Every day I would run to the library to get new books. Reading was a passion: I wanted to understand life. I read Dostoevsky and Brehm, Jules Verne and Turgenev, Dickens and the Zhivopisnoye Obozreniye; and the more I read, th emore I doubted everything. Lies surrounded me on all sides; one moment I wanted to run off to the Indian jungle, the next to throw a bomb at the governor-general's house on Tverskaya, the next to hang myself.

To hide feelings when you are near crying is the secret of dignity.

For a game, you don’t need a teacher.

A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known.

Now we’re guests in a faraway land nearly 40 years on. No trees, no cool breeze, no best friends. Only endless days spent in sending SMSs...

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!

Infinity is the end. End without infinity is but a new beginning.

A book is the cheapest ticket you will ever hold.

Modern literature is a north-east wind--a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it.

There is always the question why And there is always life, Which doesn't need an answer.

I won't stop writing until I am known as the Kurt Cobain of literature!

While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.

Too often, feelings arrive too soon, waiting for thoughts that often come too late.

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city.

The book that simply demands to be read, for no good reason, is asking us to change our lives by putting aside what we usually think of as good reasons. It's asking us to stop calculating. It's asking us to do something for the plain old delight and interest of it, not because we can justify its place on the mental spreadsheet or accounting ledger (like the one Benjamin Franklin kept) by which we tote up the value of our actions.

If want to become a person with vision, get back and reconnect to your source.

Without literature, life is hell.