Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and besides, neither of them loses anything through my infidelity.

Medeniyet yok oluyor" diye bağırdı Tom öfkeyle, "Ben artık bu konuda karamsarım. Şu Goddard denen adamın yazdığı The Rise of the Coloured Empires adlı kitabı okudun mu?

Memories of lost love they do enpain, Fleeting images of what once was never again to gain. Hold tight those memories that slip through the mind, To walk in those fields again with her—a dream divined. Oh to be with that lost Valkyrie forevermore again, To hold her hand delicate until the last world’s end. To be at peace once amore in deep loving soul, Husband to wife in embracing hold. How he loved her so, but she was now gone, Leaf to the wind, heart tossed and tumbled torn. Memories like arrows stick deep—ohhh so deep, Shafts of pain and joy assail the soul’s lonely keep. --Angel-Heart, Ch. 22 Valley of the Damned

Men could get anything they wanted from the women who sought refuge with them. Why would they be obliged to marry their women?

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem.

Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states and without contradiction

Mi čitamo knjige zato da bismo čitanjem proširili granice svog ličnog iskustva. Ako nam knjiga u tom pogledu ne daje apsolutno ništa, nijednog novog fakta, nijednog samostalnog pogleda, nijene originalne ideje, ako ničim ne pokreće i ne podstiče našu misao, mi takvu knjigu nazivamo praznom i ništavnom, bez obzira na to da li je pisana u prozi ili stihu, i uvek smo spremni da autoru takve knjige sa iskrenom dobronamernošću posavetujemo da se lati pravljenja čizama ili pečenja bureka.

[Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you. Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it.

Miss Austen has made herself known without making herself public.

Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature.

Modern civilization depends on science … James Smithson was well aware that knowledge should not be viewed as existing in isolated parts, but as a whole, each portion of which throws light on all the other, and that the tendency of all is to improve the human mind, and give it new sources of power and enjoyment … narrow minds think nothing of importance but their own favorite pursuit, but liberal views exclude no branch of science or literature, for they all contribute to sweeten, to adorn, and to embellish life … science is the pursuit above all which impresses us with the capacity of man for intellectual and moral progress and awakens the human intellect to aspiration for a higher condition of humanity. [Joseph Henry was the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, named after its benefactor, James Smithson.]

Money has the power to get, all that you want. Money has the power to make you forget, all that you want.

Moon is the light from a lantern in heaven

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.

Moral writing is boring.

Most important thing in life is family, Without them you are nothing. Whatever you do will be worth nothing, If there is no one to appreciate it.

My beloved isn't dazzling light, Darkness is my beloved – The reason I'm so fond of her…

Most people are afflicted with an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it is necessary to use the unliterary hand, twirling it in a steadily upward direction, so that human eyes will perceive the abstract figure immanent in wire spring and a certain type of staircase. But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral; it’s a circle that rises without ever closing. I realize that most people would never dare to define it this way, for they suppose that defining is to say what others want us to say rather than what’s required for the definition. I’ll say it more accurately: a spiral is a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completing itself. But no, the definition is still abstract. I’ll resort to the concrete, and all will become clear: a spiral is a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing. All literature is an attempt to make life real. All of us know, even when we act on what we don’t know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary. Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not ‘I feel like crying’, which is what an adult, i.e., an idiot, would say but rather, ’ I feel like tears.’ And this phrase -so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it - decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. ‘I feel like tears’! The small child aptly defined his spiral. To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming- like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

Mother made sure her little kids were subjected to a strict routine. We were given a timetable which covered our every waking moment, copies of which were posted by our bedside, in the sitting room and in the kitchen. Story hour meant that mother would read us novels and short stories by Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde and Edmondo de Amicis. Soon we graduated to Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. She read them to us in Chinese and I never realised until much later that the writers wrote them in different European languages. Comics were absolutely forbidden and so were Enid Blyton adventures and pop music. . .Lee Cyn and I soon went to a primary school nearby. . .After mother’s rigorous timetable, school became fun and easy-going.

Mrs. Bulstrode's naïve way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask...

Mr. Herbert Demarest Alexander Hamilton Jr. High 2236 Bedford Avenue Brooklyn NY Dear Mr Demarest, Then why don't you give him 'Withering Heights'? At least Heathcoat knew how to kick some ass. Chas. Banks 3d Base

My dis-interest in what people speak of as "women's problems," "women's literature." Have women a special sensibility? No. There are individuals uniquely talented & uniquely equipped to interpret the complex symbolism of the world but they are certainly not determined by gender. The very idea is astonishing. [...] Energy, talent, vision, insight, compassion, the ability to stay with a single work for long periods of time, the ability to be faithful (to both one's writing and one's beloved)--these have nothing to do with gender. [...] The sensibility of a Virginia Woolf, for instance. It's her own, it's uniquely hers. Not because she is a "female" but because she is, or was, Virginia Woolf. Not more sensitive than Henry James or Proust or James Joyce, consequently not more "feminine" in the narrow & misleading sense people use that term today....But then I suppose critics must have something to write about. [...]

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.

My ideas would burn barbarian stars, topple sectarian gods and raise up empires of liberty and truth.

My life had got on the wrong track, and my contact with men had become now a mere soliloquy. I had fallen so low that, if I had had to choose between falling in love with a woman and reading a book about love, I should have chosen the book.

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

My love of literature has always sustained me; more than alcohol, drugs, psychiatry and medication ever have or will.

My thoughts about pornography tend to revolve around the fact that while very few of us are zombies, detectives, cowboys, or spacemen, there are an infinite number of books that are recounting the stories of those lifestyles. However, all of us have some sort of feelings or opinions about sex. And yet the only art form which in any way is able to discuss sex, or depict sex, is this grubby despised under the counter art form, which has absolutely no standards. This was what Lost Girls was intended as a remedy for, that there is no reason why a horny piece of literature, that is purely about sex, could not be as beautiful, as meaningful, and have as absorbing characters as any other piece of fiction.

Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it. Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance.

Music , literature with poetry makes a perfect paradise.

My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger" - Billy Connolly

My grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime.I've never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.

My heart was full and uplifted; it seemed that in my soul the question arose whether such things as Art, literature, science encompassed and completed life or whether there was still something in the distance which encompassed it even more completely and filled it with a far greater happiness.

myths reflect centuries of oral tradition in non-literate as well as literate peoples – when it comes to the supernatural, there's no beating folklore.” - Breena Malloy from Bitter Frost by Kailin Gow

Negative prophecies are reversible. The Lord reveals to conquer. You are created to reverse any negative with your prayers and the word of God.

Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art—a euphemism—tamed wilderness.

Neither alive nor dead; No one lets up, No one wins.

Never fade into your life, Never stop imagining, Never give up on your dreams, You only fail, when you think you have failed.

Never stop dreaming, Never get satisfied, Make you goals bigger, every-time you reach them. Be more then you were, every day.

Nevertheless, the potential and actual importance of fantastic literature lies in such psychic links: what appears to be the result of an overweening imagination, boldly and arbitrarily defying the laws of time, space and ordered causality, is closely connected with, and structured by, the categories of the subconscious, the inner impulses of man's nature. At first glance the scope of fantastic literature, free as it is from the restrictions of natural law, appears to be unlimited. A closer look, however, will show that a few dominant themes and motifs constantly recur: deals with the Devil; returns from the grave for revenge or atonement; invisible creatures; vampires; werewolves; golems; animated puppets or automatons; witchcraft and sorcery; human organs operating as separate entities, and so on. Fantastic literature is a kind of fiction that always leads us back to ourselves, however exotic the presentation; and the objects and events, however bizarre they seem, are simply externalizations of inner psychic states. This may often be mere mummery, but on occasion it seems to touch the heart in its inmost depths and become great literature.

Ne zaman senden beklenenin sınırına gelsen karşına aynı sorun çıkar – kendin olma sorunu! Bu yönde attığın ilk adımla artı ya da eksi diye bir şey olmadığını idrak eder, patenleri fırlatıp yüzmeye başlarsın. Acı diye bir şey yoktur artık çünkü güvenliğini tehdit edecek bir şey kalmamıştır. Başkalarına yardım etme isteği bile duymazsın – hak etmeleri gereken bir ayrıcalıktan neden mahrum edesin onları? Yaşam muazzam bir sonsuzlukla andan âna esner durur. Hiçbir şey, düşlediğinden daha gerçek olamaz. Evren sen ne olduğunu sanıyorsan odur; sen, sen ve ben de ben olduğumuz sürece başka bir şey olmasına olanak yoktur. Eylemlerinin meyvelerinde yaşarsın. Eylemlerin düşüncelerinin haşatıdır. Düşünce ve eylem birdir çünkü onun içinde yüzersin. Olmasını arzuladığın her şeydir, ne eksik ne fazla. Sonsuzlukta her kulacın değeri vardır. Isıtma ve soğutma tek sistemdir. Oğlak Dönencesi ile Yengeç Dönencesi birbirlerinden sadece hayali bir çizgiyle ayrılır.

Night’s visions of tranquility slowly rolled above me by the groovy silken silence,that prevailed wisdom and by my casement,the starry beams rave,and thoughts start to sketch Nyx’s beauty, as I admired.

Never run upstairs when someone’s chasing you. Don’t try to quick-draw a man who already has his gun out. Never light a match in the dark in a strange building. Half of staying safe is just keeping your head and being prudent.

Never try to outgrow the people who were helping you walk, when you could not even walk.

New Rome will be destroyed By the attacks of new vandals. God always remains silent.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.

No, I am not imagining a book-burning, warmongering, anti-intellectual fascist regime – in my plan, there is no place for re ghters who light up the Homers and Lady Murasakis and Cao Xueqins stashed under your bed – because, for starters, I’m not banning literature per se. I’m banning the reading of literature. Purchasing and collecting books and other forms of literature remains perfectly legitimate as long as you don’t peruse the literature at hand.

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