Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

The conversational overachiever is someone whose grasp exceeds his reach. This is possible but not attractive.

The core of literature is the idea of tragedy... You don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you.

The coward only threatens when he is safe.

The crime genre's always been regarded very well by the literary end of the book world, whereas horror, although it had that spell in the late eighties, by and large, it's sort of ghetto-ized, and considered to be exploited literature.

The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them.

The critic's hankering to be law-giver rather than servant of literature is irrepressible.

The criminal is trying to solve his immediate problems.

The crown of literature is poetry.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.

The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.

The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery.

The desire to create literature leads to frights, grunts, and coy looks.

The devil is compromise.

The devil take me, if I think anything but love to be the object of love.

The devil divides the world between atheism and superstition.

The difference between me and them is that I'll look at Jesse Jackson and I'll see four Jesse Jacksons, and they'll just see one, the clown ambulance chaser.

The difference is too nice - Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

The difference between humans and wild animals is that humans pray before they commit murder.

The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.

The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.

The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.

The economic game is not supposed to be rigged like some shady ring toss on a carnival midway.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

The East was no longer a threat to the western world, and when there's nothing to fear we turn our backs, we look elsewhere. Eastern literature is still the poor relative that everyone wants to forget, the Cinderella who hasn't (yet) found her prince.

The educated do not share a common body of information, but a common state of mind.

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.

The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.

The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

The essential point of view of Christianity is sin.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

The evils of mortals are manifold; nowhere is trouble of the same wing seen.

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

The executive branch maneuvered this result deftly.

The excellence of this important contribution to genre literature CANNOT be overstated A masterwork.

The failure of modern living is the failure of the imagination...Literature is the royal road that enables us to enter the realm of the imagination.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.

The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.

The fall of dropping water wears away the Stone.

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.

The fey in this country keep to themselves, and are a separate nation, much like the American Indians, but with even more autonomy.

The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion.

The first thing I did when I sold my book was buy a new wedding ring for my wife and asked her to marry me all over again.

The first function of violence in Native American literatures is simply to acknowledge that violence is implicit, like gravity and sunlight, in the world and our relations with the world.