Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

London is a small place, and it is very incestuous. People know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.

Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.

Love is a reciprocal torture.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Love keeps the cold out better than a cloak.

Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down your fence.

Love, the quest; marriage, the conquest; divorce, the inquest.

Lust and greed are more gullible than innocence.

Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.

Magic realism - somebody used that phrase the other day that is familiar with South American literature. That rang a bell. It resonates with me.

Managing bottom-up change is its own art.

Malice is always authentic and sincere.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.

Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

Many Europeans think that all Moroccans speak French, but no. I had to make an effort to learn it when I studied French literature at the university in Rabat.

Many journalists seem to believe that we have become little different from our enemies.

Many people feel they must multi-task because everybody else is multitasking, but this is partly because they are all interrupting each other so much.

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

Maria Edgeworth grumbled against vandals who ruined immortal works by quoting the life out of them. "How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets." Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden, scissored, patched, and frayed.

Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.

Many speak the truth when they say that they despise riches, but they mean the riches possessed by others.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Mark Twain created a new type of literature and not a lot of people can say that. Not a lot of people can say they're absolutely original and completely self-made.

[Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.

Marriage may be the closest thing to Heaven or Hell any of us will know on this earth.

Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.

Maxims and aphorisms, let us remember that wisdom is the true salt of literature, and the books that are most nourishing are richly stored with it, and that is the main object to seek in reading books.

Mathematics to me is like a language I don’t speak though I admire its literature in translation.

Matrimony; the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented.

Mathematics is no more computation than typing is literature.

Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.

Matrimony is the union of meanness and martyrdom.

May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.

Mediocre men work at their best; men seeking excellence strive to do better.

May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

Men and girls, men and girls: Artificial swine and pearls.

Men don't and can't live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don't live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions.