Best 5099 quotes in «literature quotes» category

A lazy summer's day and a long, lost love. Can a poet ask for anything better than a broken heart ordained from above? --the poet; unknown, Orange Room Poems

A la literatura no hay que ponerle cáscaras ni cerrojos. La ficción debe ser pura libertad.

A la estación se la comen las casas adosadas y luego los campos se comen a las casas, primero vacíos y después salpicados de ovejas. La gente se quita el abrigo y enciende los portátiles y se oye un suspiro colectivo. Al otro lado del pasillo una mujer abre una bolsa de patatas con queso y cebolla. Parpadea y se mete cinco en la boca. Se hacen pedazos y suenan como los parásitos de la radio.

A letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian.

A library is more precious than a bank.

A literatura era o melhor brinquedo que se tinha inventado para gozar com as pessoas

A literatura, seja como for, também é uma espécie de aproximação, a busca de uma verdade que não se alcança.

All aspiring writers say these things: "I will not compromise and write a best seller!"—as if they could! There may be a few totally faked-up books that sell, but on the whole I believe every writer writes as well as he can.

All classes in proportion to their lack of travel and familiarity with foreign literature are bellicose, prejudiced against foreigners, fond of fighting as a cruel sport -- in short, dog-like in their notions of foreign policy." [Quoted in Socialism and Foreign Policy and War and the Liberal Conscience]

Allah herşeyi görüyorsa niçin bütün dertleri bir tek kişinin omuzlarına yüklüyor? Bir parça insaflı olamaz mı?

All hen are created equal but some have more feather than others.

All in your thoughts is how you create, prophecy of your future in the present is to stimulate and manipulate what's to come at a later date. Give attention as I put this food for thought on a line and hook like it's spiritual bait.

All people are enslaved by something.

All photos speak a thousand words. This one contained a library.

All the great novels are about obsession and people who are obsessed.

All the latchkey children cursed and smashed bottles, teased about underwear, and puffed on those unfiltered cigarettes that only the cowboys could roll.

All the great stories are about obsession and people who are obsessed.

A lot of people pray for power, house, financial breakthrough, wealth etc. But only few ask God for wisdom. There are so many great power pack man and women of God who lack wisdom.

Although personal calling I sense, Who am I? even if I am, I don't know.

Although all days are equally long regardless of the season, some days are long not only seasonally but by rewards they offer.

Although many things may still need to happen before you identify what your exact work will be, I know that every single person whom you’re meeting and every experience that you’re having is necessary to you discovering your purpose. They are points on a map leading you to the moment where a match will finally be lit and you will be able to see through the darkness.

Although we had had no precise exponents of realism, yet after Pushkin it was impossible for a Russian writer to depart too far from actuality. Even those who did not know what to do with "real life" had to cope with it as best they could. Hence, in order that the picture of life should not prove too depressing, the writer must provide himself in due season with a philosophy.

A man with wisdom will always have a solution no matter how big his challenges may be. Wisdom makes you a problem solver.

A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth.

Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space in a single house or single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books.

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.

A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.

Amerikalıların ara sıra toprak kölesi olmayı istedikleri olur, ama köylü sınıfından olmaya karşı hep direnmişlerdir.

Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down.

Ancient literature is a rich history.

And adab towards language means the recognition and acknowledgement of the rightful and proper place of every word in a written or uttered sentence so as not to produce a dissonance in meaning, sound and concept. Literature is called adabiyat in Islam precisely because it is seen as the keeper of civilization, the collector of teachings and statements that educate the self and society with adab such that both are elevated to the rank of the cultured man (insan adabi) and society.

And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf—felt akin to an instance of religious grace.

And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman!!

And if I am not mistaken here is the secret of the greatness that was Spain. In Spain it is men that are the poems, the pictures and the buildings. Men are its philosophies. They lived, these Spaniards of the Golden Age; they felt and did; they did not think. Life was what they sought and found, life in its turmoil, its fervour and its variety. Passion was the seed that brought them forth and passion was the flower they bore. But passion alone cannot give rise to a great art. In the arts the Spaniards invented nothing. They did little in any of those they practised, but give a local colour to a virtuosity they borrowed from abroad. Their literature, as I have ventured to remark, was not of the highest rank; they were taught to paint by foreign masters, but, inapt pupils, gave birth to one painter only of the very first class; they owed their architecture to the Moors, the French and the Italians, and the works themselves produced were best when they departed least from their patterns. Their preeminence was great, but it lay in another direction: it was a preeminence of character. In this I think they have been surpassed by none and equalled only by the ancient Romans. It looks as though all the energy, all the originality, of this vigorous race had been disposed to one end and one end only, the creation of man. It is not in art that they excelled, they excelled in what is greater than art--in man. But it is thought that has the last word.

...and here, in this if I always lose myself.

And let my liver rather heat with wine Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.

And now the bride begins to move. Little mechanical doll, clinging to her husband’s arm, climbing into the carriage. Her white silk stocking, her elegant shoe.

And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.

And so it was literature that brought me back to life.

And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.

And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics? "If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.

And when the war's over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we'll set it up in type until another Dark age.

An author who does not support his or her characters does not deserve the support of readers. EVER!

.... And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time

And I had just kissed my ex-girlfriend, who had cried, while my current girlfriend was in jail. So far, it had not been my best day.

And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left-say we lost everything-we'd still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognised line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we've forgotten we even know it.

And now you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid and more abiding than those which come to us in sleep, why then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which only we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slow course of their development prevents us from perceiving them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

And speaking of this wonderful machine: [840] I’m puzzled by the difference between Two methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind, A testing of performing words, while he Is soaping a third time one leg, and B, The other kind, much more decorous, when He’s in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought, The abstract battle is concretely fought. The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar [850] A canceled sunset or restore a star, And thus it physically guides the phrase Toward faint daylight through the inky maze. But method A is agony! The brain Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain. A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the will Can interrupt, while the automaton Is taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before.