Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

This was a crime of passion, but unlike most crimes of passion, it had been meticulously and diabolically well-planned.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was about: Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God.

This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)

Those critics who consider the authority of the ancients as models to be such, that in poetry, as in all the other arts, there can be no safety out of the pale of imitation, affirm, that as the nations in question have not followed this course, they have brought nothing but irregular works on the stage, which, though they may possess occasional passages of splendour and beauty, must yet, as a whole, be for ever reprobated as barbarous, and wanting in form.

Those were cities with archives, university presses, libraries—cities where students went to learn from books, not from "life." And they were right, those students: I had seen life, and it hadn't added up to anything.

Though I have lived most of my life with educationalists, I have little interest in educa¬ tion. I dislike schools, both for boys and girls. A child between the ages of eight and eighteen, the normal school years, is too young to form a collective opinion, children only set up foolish savage taboos. I dislike also all plans for “developing a child’s mind ”, and all conscious forms of personal influence of the younger by the elder. Let children early speak at least three foreign languages, let them browse freely in a good library, see all they can of the first-rate in nature, art, and literature—above all, give them a chance of knowing what science and scientific method means, and then leave them to sink or swim. Above all things, do not cultivate in them a taste for literature.

Through everything I have passed but nowhere I have been.

Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words.

Thus like a Captive in an Isle confin'd, Man walks at large, a Pris'ner of the Mind

Time advanced again—Time machine’s pace became unusually up normal,the reality of my life stood in front of me when the journey continued mountain over mountains.We passed over more than a million rivers and streams of good and bad water as my insight intertwined a society. In the narrow paths of my life I felled,I bled with my solitary heart, as I knew I became a burden for a wild society. The crime I did was I created Literature with my spiral imagination.

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.

Time in the most powerful thing. Not money, not power, not hope. A person can have everything they desire but without time they are, all useless.

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.

To become a 'good reader' one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but may spend two or three years on one book [. . .], read only portions of another, devour a third at a single sitting.

To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow.

To cut and tighten sentences is the secret of mastery.

Today is the beginning of new history.

To delight in literature is to desire to learn.

Todo éxito es una apología de lo vulgar. Cualquier libro que rebasa los cien ejemplares es un fracaso para el buen gusto. ¿O qué habría de pensarse de un mismo libro leído simultáneamente por cien mil personas? ¿Se diría que lo que se está leyendo es literatura?, ¿qué tan complaciente habrá de ser ese libro para satisfacer a tantos lectores? ¿O es que la inteligencia está tan democráticamente repartida?

To expect to be kissed having bad breath is the secret of a fool.

To go where no one else has ever gone before is the secret of heroism.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

To jump over centuries In one step is impossible. Jump too high or far, You’ll be way too late.

To hell with irony and wit! I read to be moved.

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. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.10 10 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize that the quickest way to kill an author's vitality for potential readers is to present that author ahead of his time as "great" or "classic." Because then the author becomes for the students like medicine or vegetables, something the authorities have declared "good for them" that they "ought to like," at which point the students' nictitating membranes come down, and everyone just goes through the requisite motions of criticism and paper-writing without feeling one real or relevant thing. It's like removing all oxygen from the room before trying to start a fire.

To maintain your honesty , one must know to keep alive the spirit of chidhood

To not say all that can be said is the secret of discipline and economy.

To me without Dostoievsky's work there would be a deep, black hole in world literature. The loss of Shakespeare, who must seem like a wild man to the Chinese, would not be as great as losing Dostoievsky.

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank’s illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two favourites he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit. But presently he wondered if this spirit were not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. ‘I have often thought’, he said to himself, ‘that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.’ He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep. He woke two or three times in the night, an unusual occurrence, but he was glad of it, for each time he had been dreaming horribly of these blameless Victorian works… It turned out to be the Boy’s Gulliver’s Travels that Granny had given him, and Dicky had at last to explain his rage with the devil who wrote it to show that men were worse than beasts and the human race a washout. A boy who never had good school reports had no right to be so morbidly sensitive as to penetrate to the underlying cynicism of Swift’s delightful fable, and that moreover in the bright and carefully expurgated edition they bring out nowadays. Mr Corbett could not say he had ever noticed the cynicism himself, though he knew from the critical books it must be there, and with some annoyance he advised his son to take out a nice bright modern boy’s adventure story that could not depress anybody. Mr Corbett soon found that he too was ‘off reading’. Every new book seemed to him weak, tasteless and insipid; while his old and familiar books were depressing or even, in some obscure way, disgusting. Authors must all be filthy-minded; they probably wrote what they dared not express in their lives. Stevenson had said that literature was a morbid secretion; he read Stevenson again to discover his peculiar morbidity, and detected in his essays a self-pity masquerading as courage, and in Treasure Island an invalid’s sickly attraction to brutality. This gave him a zest to find out what he disliked so much, and his taste for reading revived as he explored with relish the hidden infirmities of minds that had been valued by fools as great and noble. He saw Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as two unpleasant examples of spinsterhood; the one as a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else’s flirtations, the other as a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions. He compared Wordsworth’s love of nature to the monstrous egoism of an ancient bellwether, isolated from the flock.

To read Shakespeare is to feel encompassed -- the plays contain practically every word I know, practically every character type I have ever met, and practically every idea I have ever had.

Total knowledge is annihilation Of the desire to see, to touch, to feel The world sensed only through senses And immune to the knowledge without feeling.

To the knights of faith nobody believes.

To understand possible means to understand impossible.

...to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself. This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.

To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light.

To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism.

To write good poems is the secret of brevity.

Treat your mind like a museum, not a warehouse

True love finds its own ways To spread goodness, always.

Truth is hard-hearted and unrelenting, too clear, precise; a lie is much more imaginative.

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful.

Tutto questo” pensava “non dovrebbe poter durare; però durerà, sempre; il sempre umano, beninteso, un secolo, due secoli...; e dopo sarà diverso, ma peggiore. Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti Gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra”.

Turn those deep feelings and obsessions of your heart into captivating pieces of literature.

Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.

Tutto questo mentre stavano imparando l'unica lezione della vita: che nella vita di un individuo accadono più incidenti di quanto un uomo possa ammettere, se non vuole correre il rischio di impazzire.

Upon reading, great stories by Great Spirits, the glorious inspiration penetrated our soul; we can’t help but to shed tears. It was a soul soothing and a deep spiritual awaken.

Unborn eternity does not die; existence is dying and falls asleep in the eternity beyond existence.

Une œuvre où il y a des théories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix.