Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

We shall perish by guile just as we slew.

We should not see print and electronic literature as in competition, but rather in conversation. The more voices that join in, the richer the dialogue is likely to be.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

We spend so much time, these days, on forms of literature that don't rise to be literature, and I'm speaking about Twitter posts and quick and hot takes on different websites. We sort of zoom from thing to thing like a hummingbird.

Western literature has been more influenced by the Bible than any other book.

We study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderers and rapists... to understand how those evil things came about.

We turn to literature to remedy the loss, to impose some kind of meaningful order on the nonsequential.

We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature hath set none.

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

We've got to recognize that when we march into Iraq, we're setting up the card tables in front of every university in the Arab world, the Islamic world, to recruit for al-Qaida.

We've had a chance to be seen by viewers who had never seen us before, and we've kept a lot of them.

We've got to have a dream if we are going to make a dream come true.

We wanted to write the first prequels as a story that anyone could pick up.

We wanted to make sure that the film covered the main issues of his life. Musicianship, appearance.

We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this general and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see.

We've seen in the last half century an incredible shift. This is just an extraordinary time to be alive.

We want to feel that this earth is all ours, like our parents' house when we were children.

We will always tend to fulfill our own expectation of ourselves.

We will burn that bridge when we come to it.

We will not have peace by afterthought.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

What by a straight path cannot be reached by crooked ways is never won.

What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.

Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.

What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.

Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess.

Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.

Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.

What fascinated me mostly about Mickey Cohen was that he, in his later years, hired someone to help him to comprehend literature, to help him to read better, to understand words better.

What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.

What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

What is a magazine? A small body of Literature entirely surrounded by advertisements.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.

What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.

What is called good society is usually nothing but a mosaic of polished caricatures.

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

What is music. A passion for colonies not a love of country.

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?

What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?