Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

Without literature my life would be miserable.

Without literature, life is hell.

With renunciation life begins.

Wit is an explosion of the compound spirit.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.

Woman and men of retiring timidity are cowardly only in dangers which affect themselves, but the first to rescue when others are in danger.

Wit is the lowest form of humor.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.

Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.

Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

Words are but pictures of our thoughts.

Words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.

Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Worried about being a dull fellow? You might develop your talent for being irritating.

Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.

writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints.

Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life

Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

Yeah, but now suddenly - you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too.

Yeah, Hitman I suppose is most of the time a lighter read than Preacher; it was always going to be.

You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other.

Yet humanitarianism is not a purely Christian movement any more than it is a purely humanist one

You are no better than you should be.

You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices.

You can believe in originals only if you just don't know their context within literature. Certainly I believe in originality, but it lies with the teller, not the tale.

You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

You cannot be responsible for salvation until first you've been responsible for sin.

You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.

You can say that literature is about topics like love, death, and all that, but I think there is only one topic that applies to all literature and that is belonging.

You can plan to be brave - it's even better if you just try to be brave.

You can see the diversity that pieces in the anthology represent, and then the interconnections-obvious and less obvious-between various stories or between various modes of storytelling. Diversity generates need for conversation, conversation generates common interests, as well as differences. Literature, as a human project, is all about that.

You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.

You can't change your life. This mode in literature goes against the more middle-brown mode, which is about shaping your destiny, changing it. You can't change it, you just become passive in front of it. Even if we live in a godless universe, there are paths set, there are trajectories, like bumper cars just pulling those trajectories, colliding.

You can tell a man's taste in literature by his judgment in knowing what not to read.

You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.

You can travel through literature, and you can expand your mind through literature. It's so cheap to buy that kind of ticket.

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

You can, when Time is ripe, swope to your feet - at your full height - at a single gesture. Ready to go where? Why... Wherever God motions.

You don't know whether he's thought through how this is going to affect the Middle East.