Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

We live in a world where there is such a clear definition of what a girl should be that it takes almost no effort at all to completely hate ourselves.

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.  We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and metre—harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods—but this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.  We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure.  From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised.  We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer. -ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.

we must bring our own light to the darkness.

We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.

We need knew knights, but without swords.

We ought to know the history of our ancient ancestors.

We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a col­lab­o­ra­tive act.

We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there...

We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.

We shared a daughter? I'd not thought about it that way before. If we shared a daughter, and something happened to Claire, then I would not have to hare Esther with her anymore. I would have Esther to myself.

We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention.

We sometimes reveal how ignorant or bored we were when we read a book by giving it 5-stars.

We think and believe that we are exceptional. We have created so many stories around how exceptional humans are. We were created by the hands of the divine, and the universe is our gift. We believe that it was all created to serve us, but the reality of the matter is, we are not exceptional except for our ability to kill beauty and destroy. We are not as fast as the gazelle or a cheetah; we can't fly like birds; we don't have fur to protect us in the cold; we don't have natural strength to lift heavy objects like a gorilla or an elephant. We created fables to explain our presence, even scientific ones that we can't prove. It is all unproven theories, on all sides. We are not exceptional; we are only exceptional when we work together and in sync with nature like every other creature.

We travel to ancient times by reading history books.

We traveled long and forgot why poetry was invented.

We were supposed to be an English literature class, but Miss Nesbitt used literature to teach real life. She said she didn't have time to teach us like a regular English teacher--we were too far behind. Instead, she taught us the world through literature.

We were magical and alive - we cared about music and conversation, sex and spit and blood, holding on tight to the space between youth and adulthood. When I look back at that time, my nostalgia can be blinding. Because we weren’t night dwellers, vampires who would live forever. We were a bunch of kids playing at being Lost Boys, looking for our version of Neverland.

We work all our lives to be who we become. And, it's who we become that determines what becomes of us.

We write to strengthen our soul and the spirit of other souls.

What agenda does this universe have? What game is it I am oblivious to?

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." [Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]

What a face this girl possessed!—could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.

What a glut of books! Who can read them?

What, after all, is the creation? What is man; a creature fabricated by God; or is he the product of millions of years of evolution… and is he heading towards what we might call superman? or towards his doom?

What are the unreal things but the passion that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?

What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness.

What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another-- here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it. Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live.

What do you think about America?" "Everyone always smiles so big! Well—most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.

What is hell to a writer? Hell is being too busy to find the time to write or being unable to find the inspiration. Hell is suddenly finding the words but being away from your notebook or typewriter. Hell is when the verses slip away through your fingers and they never return again.

What happens when two introverts collide? Do they dissolve completely in each other’s patience and silence, or do they break their glass shells and become new people?

What is life but a fucked-up factory fabricating fuckups?

What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices? What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners?

What is a novel if not a trap for catching a hero?

What is the point of all these books when I learn best by reading your body?

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former.

What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events? How much of recollection is invention? Whose invention?

What puzzled Abel about life was how much one forgot but then lived with anyway - like phantom limbs, he supposed.

What surfaced was the surprising power of our cultural heritage.

What we mean when speaking of "myth" in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry—all very highly useful and informative in their own right—can't.

What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.

What’s missing from the literature of our species are the stories of the peasants. The filthy illiterate. Those with no firm address, no surname. No one to impress, nothing to lose. But the poor tell stories, too.

What we call life is only talk of nature.

What would be the description of happines? Nothing, except what prepares and then what destroys it, can be told.

What would you expect to find when the muzzle that has silenced the voices of black men is removed? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?

When all is lost, there is still a memory.

Whenever I encounter writer’s block, I stop writing … with my hands; and I then start writing with my legs.

When everything hurries everywhere, nothing goes anywhere.

When he returned to Florida in the early part of 1939, Hemingway took his boat the Pilar across the Straits of Florida to Havana, where he checked into the Hotel Ambos Mundos. Shortly thereafter, Martha joined him in Cuba and they first rented, and later in 1940, purchased their home for $12,500. Located 10 miles to the east of Havana, in the small town of San Francisco de Paula, they settled into what they called Finca Vigía, the Lookout Farm. On November 20, 1940, after a difficult divorce from Pauline, Ernest and Martha got married. Even though Cuba had become their home, they still took editorial assignments overseas, including one in China that Martha had for Collier’s magazine. Returning to Cuba just prior to the outbreak of World War II, he convinced the Cuban government to outfit his boat with armaments, with which he intended to ambush German submarines. As the war progressed, Hemingway went to London as a war correspondent, where he met Mary Welsh. His infatuation prompted him to propose to her, which of course did not sit well with Martha. Hemingway was present at the liberation of Paris and attended a party hosted by Sylvia Beach. He, incidentally, also renewed a friendship with Gertrude Stein. Becoming a famous war correspondence he covered the Battle of the Bulge, however he then spent the rest of the war on the sidelines hospitalized with pneumonia. Even so, Ernest was awarded the Bronze Star for bravery. Once again, Hemingway fell in lust, this time with a 19-year-old girl, Adriana Ivancich. This so-called platonic, wink, wink, love affair was the essence of his novel Across the River and Into the Trees, which he wrote in Cuba.