Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

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.

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

In the course of time, Michael Strogoff reached a high station in the Empire. But it is not the history of his success, but the history of his trials, which deserves to be related.

In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing.

In the Dictionary 'lumpy jaw' comes just before 'lunacy,' but in life there are no such clues. Suddenly, for no reason, you might start to dribble from the mouth, to howl peevishly at the moon. You might start quoting your mother, out loud and with conviction. You might lose your friends to the most uninspired of deaths. You might one day wake up and find yourself teaching at a community college; there will have been nothing to warn you. You might say things to your students like, There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you.

In the dream, Tana's mother loved her more than anyone or anything. More than death.

In the end, the world returns to a grain.

In the first week they were seen setting off from the visitor centre with their father leading the way, returning an hour later in the sort of glowering silence that follows a difference of views.

In the flailing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances

In the lie of truth lies the truth.

In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.

In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of words together, and we learn what language does and why it matters. this is excellent training for going out into the world and looking at all the unhallowed speech of political statements and news headlines and CDC instructions and seeing how it makes the word or in this case, makes a mess of it. It is the truest, highest purpose of language to make things clear and help us see; when words are used to do the opposite you know you're in trouble and maybe that there's a cover-up.

In this, journey, of reaching, to myself, I have had, many a, thoroughfares, goodbye affairs, reality checks, and, lovely overwhelms.

In worldly terms, she was totally innocent; Eve before the fall, with no knowledge of good and evil. She made one realize how necessary the Fall was; without it, there would have been no human drama, and so no literature, no art, no suffering, no religion, no laughter, no joy, no sin and no redemption. Only camera work (towards which Mrs. Dobbs's painting was reaching) and sociology (which her sister, Beatrice Webb, may be said to have invented).

In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.

...I particularly loved biographies because they were about people who had to overcome obstacles or prejudices to get ahead. They made me think I could make it when nobody else believed in me, when even I didn't believe in myself.

I read Ivan's messages over and over, thinking about what they meant. I felt ashamed, but why? Why was it more honorable to reread and interpret a novel like Lost Illusions than to reread and interpret some email from Ivan? Was it because Ivan wasn't as good a writer as Balzac? (But I thought Ivan was a good writer.) Was it because Balzac's novels had been read and analyzed by hundreds of professors, so that reading and interpreting Balzac was like participating in a conversation with all these professors, and was therefore a higher and more meaningful activity than reading an email only I could see? But the fact that the email had been written specifically to me, in response to things I had said, made it literally a conversation, in the way that Balzac's novels—written for a general audience, ultimately in order to turn a profit for the printing industry—were not; and so wasn't what I was doing in a way more authentic, and more human?

I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.

I seek to take my audience on an emotional roller-coaster ride, a journey of laughter and tears and every sentiment in between.

I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop - how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity

I shall tell you what I believe. I believe God is a librarian. I believe that literature is holy...it is that best part of our souls that we break off and give each other, and God has a special dispensation for it, angels to guard its making and its preservation.

I shouted the perfect words to scare him off. It was just the delivery (and only the delivery) that made me sound like a twelve-year-old girl with pee running down her leg. I felt dirty and stupid.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family.

I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hungarian for the lower classes of the gymnasium, for kids from 10 to 14. I never made use of this teaching certificate. And then I came to philosophy, physics, and mathematics. In fact, I came to mathematics indirectly. I was really more interested in physics and philosophy and thought about those. It is a little shortened but not quite wrong to say: I thought I am not good enough for physics and I am too good for philosophy. Mathematics is in between.

I steal a glance when no one is looking. Especially at his neck, when he turns to say something to my mother. That slender neck, with its air of determination, brisk and bold…

Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "... a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution?

Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping? Is an electron a wave or a particle? Slipstream tells us that the answer is yes.

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life.

It did not seem to Plato any insult to philosophy that it should be transformed into literature, realized as drama, and beautified with style; nor any derogation to its dignity that it should apply itself, even intelligibly, to living problems of morality and the state.

I think people should take mythology much more seriously, because it tells us an awful lot about the history of the human race. We tend to dismiss it as 'fairy tales,' when it isn't. Fairy tales in themselves are about fundamentals of human nature. And they keep being reinvented in different ways. Fantasy acknowledges that, whereas a lot of modern literature is trying to distance itself from 'story,' never mind anything else. Which is why a lot of books are read by the critics, then people buy them, put them on their shelves, and don't really read them much, because they're not very interesting!

I think part of why I have so many books around me and why I read every day is because I mythologize the writer. I don’t do that with any other artists.

I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably. Please don't think that my reaction is the result of intolerance towards my neighbor: the worst discomfort of all comes from hearing myself speak. That's why I try to talk as little as possible. If I prefer writing, it is because I can revise each sentence until I reach the point where - if not exactly satisfied with my words - I am able at least to eliminate those reasons for dissatisfaction that I can put a finger on. Literature - and I mean the literature that matches up to those requirements - is the promised land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.

I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.

I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

It is a dangerous thing to substitute reading or writing for living. Live first, then write.

I think it all basically breaks down to something like this: You have to look and feel great first. If you eat well, exercise and get enough sleep, you will have ample energy and the proper self-confidence to create and produce beyond your wildest dreams! Looking great and radiating positive energy, while presenting your highest quality work, is what will always make you the most valuable and only logical choice in whatever it is that you reach for.

I think it will be better if we can live our life as if Christ is going to return today and plan our live as if it is hundred years off. Keep living, serving and most of all be prepared.

I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby]

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices of things we eat or something? Ain't that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less?

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first. You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure. You may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull days come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait so patiently for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which marks an epoch in your life, you understand the difference. You see, like a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and the other for literature. From that day onwards you may return to your crudities, but at least you do so with some standard of comparison in your mind. You can never be the same as you were before. Then gradually the good thing becomes more dear to you; it builds itself up with your growing mind; it becomes a part of your better self, and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past.

It is futile to spend time telling stories about the fleetness of each day.

It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble.

It is for art to present images of a lovelier order than the actual, gently winning the affections, and so determining the taste.

It is impossible to describe any person as they actually are. The moment you talk about a person, even mention their name, you trivialize them.

It is impossible to enjoy divine protection without the word of God. You must be a word addict.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society.[...]what the poet is saying- that is, what his poem "means" if translated into prose- is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether.