Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

His examiner said severely: "Baskerville, you blank round, discursiveness is not literature." "The aim of literature," Baskerville replied grandly, "is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle.

Hindu religious literature, indeed all religious literature, is full of illustrations to prove the truth.

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

History takes time. History makes memory.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

Holden Caulfield is the best character in literature, period.

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

Hollywood is a narcotic, not a stimulant. It wants to sell you something. Literature wants to tell you something.

Honesty prospers in every condition of life.

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.

Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.

Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

House guests should be regarded as perishables: Leave them out too long and they go bad.

Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?

How blessings brighten as they take their flight.

How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?

How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?

How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood? How can we pray to God for mercy if we ourselves have no mercy? Nobel laureate in literature.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?

How easily some light report is set about, but how difficult to bear.

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.

How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

How much of our literature, our political life, our friendships and love affairs, depend on being able to talk peacefully in a bar!

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.

Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.

Humanity is made up of an infinity of different individuals. Each of us travels for motives exclusively his own.

Hulga the whole while hollering like a half-slaughtered hog. (Attention, students of literature! Alliteration - have you noticed? - is my least vice.)

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

Human nature is above all things lazy.

Human misery is too great for men to die without faith.

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.

Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain.

Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness, but enables us to move back from it a little.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Humourists lead... an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.

Hunger is insolent, and will be fed.